
Book-j^V^ 

GopyriglitiNi*?__ _ 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 



In riiHE Q5lTNBSS-B0X 



OP^, SUGGESfPIYB gAI^ALLBIiS 



j(-;. BY 
Nf L. WILLET 




PHILADELPHIA 

(3rtratb anD IRowlanD Ipreae 






THfe LlbRAKY OF 
CONGRESS. 

Tw<» Cop}«« Received 

JAN 5 1903 

Copyright CLntry 
CLASS CU XXc. Y 

COPT e. 



, Ne. 



Copyright 1902 by the 
American Baptist Publication Society 



Published January, 1903 



from tbc Society's own prcs? 



to 

V 



■r 






This book is lovingly dedicated to the 
memory of my father 

prof^ 5o0epb BDgerton TlXHillet, B* fin*, XX. ©♦ 

Teacher^ Author^ Scientist 
Lover of Nature^ and Lover of God 



PREFACE 

All kingdoms were made by God, and lie par- 
allel. The laws and phenomena of one kingdom, 
therefore, must have their counterparts in the 
other kingdoms. 

This great and ramifying Nature about us, vis- 
ible and tangible and patent, was, I doubt not, 
meant by heaven to be for man a kindergarten 
school, wherein he might learn not only things 
earthly but also things heavenly. 

This book is an attempt at the making plain of 
certain of Nature's laws and phenomena, and at 
the finding of their certain parallels in kingdoms 
that are higher. It is an attempt first, to increase 
our love for and knowledge of Nature herself, 
and then to make that love and knowledge con- 
cerning this which is visible serve as means for 
greater love and knowledge and faith in kingdoms 
that are invisible. 

I beg to return my thanks for assistance in the 
final revision of the text to the well-known scien- 
tists, Profs. John B. De Motte and H. C. White. 

Nathaniel L. Willet. 

Augusta, Ga., December, 1902. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I. The Field of Force i 

II. The Absolute and the Infinite 5 

III. Earth's Chaos 10 

IV. Earth's Awakening 14 

V. Carbon 19 

VI. Nature's Equilibrium 24 

VII. Where Earth's Trinity Meets 29 

VIII. Nature's Great and Small 34 

IX. Nature's Invisible and Hidden Things . 38 

X. New Relationships in Nature 43 

XL The Horizon 48 

XII. Landmarks 52 

XIII. Drift in Nature 56 

XIV. Paths 61 

XV. Oases **the Islands of the Blessed " . . 66 

XVI. Laboratory Methods 70 

XVII. The Media Through which we See . . 74 

XVIII. Frost 79 

XIX. Fogs 83 

XX. The Properties of Matter 88 

XXI. Stress and Strain 92 

XXII. Friction 96 

XXIII. Forms and Shapes loi 

XXIV. Lubricants, the Peacemakers 105 

XXV. Heat Conductors 109 

XXVI. The Center of Gravity 114 

vii 



Vlll CONTENTS 

PAGE 

XXVII. By-products Sometimes Called 

' ' Waste " 1 1 8 

XXVIII. Overtones, or Fullness of Life ... 122 

XXIX. Things Homogeneous 127 

XXX. Viscosity 131 

XXXI. Radiation of Heat 136 

XXXI I. For the Protection of Life 140 

XXXIIL Sediment 145 

XXXIV. The Clinging Ones 150 

XXXV. Chlorophyl 154 

XXXVI. The Warping of Timber 158 

XXXVII. Dormants 162 

XXXVIII. Wings 166 

XXXIX. Nature's Voices c 171 

XL. Compensation 175 

XLI. Strength in Calmness 180 

XLII. Barriers 184 

XLIII. Bridging Chasms 189 

XLIV. Is IT A Clod? 193 

XLV. Solvents 197 

XLVI. Chemical Reagents 202 

XLVII. Lost Motion 206 

XLVIII. Resistance 211 

XLIX. Nature's Varied Standpoints . . . . 215 

L. Harmony 220 



NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 




THE FIELD OF FORCE. 

N all parts of the country where certain 
rocks are disintegrating, down the little 
water-runs of the continuous streams, or 
the temporary ones made by rain, you will see 
among the sands millions of little black particles 
of iron. More often than not they are arranged 
in lines and figures according to the current and 
wavy line of the stream. Take an ordinary horse- 
shoe magnet and run it through these dry sands, 
and the iron particles will adhere to it. These 
iron particles, or ordinary iron filings, afford us 
the means for a certain experiment, the phenom- 
enon of which is most interesting and graphically 
wonderful. For if we sift these particles on a 
paper stretched on a frame, and hold the paper 
just above a horseshoe magnet, and then gently 
tap the paper, so as to overcome for the par- 
ticles gravity and friction, we shall see our iron 
particles arrange themselves into the most re- 



NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 



markable and beautiful curves. Not an iron par- 
ticle within the magnet's range of influence but 
will arrange itself as a part of a beautiful ellip- 
tical line. There will be hundreds of these curved 
lines — called magnetic curves ; and their total ef- 
fect on the paper sheet, as a phenomenon, and 
with the magnet hidden, seems magical and al- 
most beyond crediting. At any given point with- 
in the field its magnetic curve is the resultant of 
the magnetic forces at that point ; and the direc- 
tions of the varied curves are called lines of force. 

Now there are millions of other particles of 
varied matter that one could set down in similar 
manner upon this our magnetic field ; but the 
strongest magnet on earth could not move them 
by its force or influence into any curved or other 
line. Non-responsive they would stand like stocks. 
The intensity of magnetism of any given particle 
depends upon the strength of the magnet and the 
distance of the particle from it. 

This whole earth is an immense magnetic field. 
Magnetize a needle and suspend it at any point on 
the earth's surface, and it will assume a certain 
position with reference to the earth's poles. Though 
pointing all to the same end, yet the dip or curve 
of no two needles will be just the same. And if 
you had myriads of magnetized needles on a plane 
surface of earth, you would see in their final adjust- 



THE FIELD OF FORCE 



ments the same beautiful phenomenon that we 
saw on our sheet of paper. For, in truth, each 
bit of iron filing on the sheet was a tiny magnet- 
ized needle. This sheet of paper of ours was a 
minute picture of that grander effect that would 
result if magnetized needles were infinitely multi- 
plied over all the plane surface of the earth. No 
needle would be out of line and every needle would 
be in some one of the lines of force that proceeded 
like rays of light from the earth's pole. 

And yet think of the infinite mass of earth's 
matter particles that, inert and dead and uninflu- 
enced, do not so much as know that the earth has 
magnetic poles, and that there are lines of force, 
and that they themselves are within the boundaries 
of a magnetic field. There are, indeed, even wide 
variations of magnetic susceptibility on the part of 
the various irons. Soft iron is more susceptible 
than cast iron, and fine steel more susceptible than 
other forms of iron. 

This strange force that goes out so silently from 
the magnet hidden behind our paper sheet — force 
exerted so potently upon our iron filings — is con- 
stant and unwavering. And so is this seemingly 
still stranger force that proceeds from the poles of 
our earth. This force, of all the existent forces, 
has most the touch in it of the spiritual. It does 
not seem strange, therefore, and indeed it seems 



NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 



the rather fitting, that this spirit-like force — though 
it is exerted so weakly that it could scarcely, from 
an earthly view, be called a force — should point 
out all the new pathways in the land, and should 
guide all the mariners on the unknown seas, and 
enable the lost and bewildered to discover, in a 
moment, their true relative positions. 

Through the compass humanity has placed itself 
in the line with reference to our poles ; and there 
could be no more beautiful magnetic curve than 
that one that points the guiding hand. But w^e 
may yet gain an intensity of magnetization un- 
dreamed of to-day ; and in this wider magnetic 
field of force find a thousand new and unknown 
curves of beauty and usefulness, all of them radi- 
ating for our good, from the unseen magnet with 
its two distant poles, set by God in the founda- 
tions of earth. 

The most powerful magnet in creation is not 
one whose poles are the ends of axes of either 
planet, sun, or star. The widest magnetic field of 
force is not the largest created material sphere. 
The whole creation is a magnetic field, and heaven 
is the magnet. From out of heaven lines of force 
proceed, like rays of light from the sun. The in- 
tensity Qf your magnetism depends upon how far 
from heaven you stand, and the fine or dull or in- 



THE ABSOLUTE AND THE INFINITE 5 

different quality of your spirit. Millions of human 
stocks and stones on earth feel no magnetic thrill, 
and individually become no part of any of these 
magnetic curves of infinite number that reach 
from heaven to earth and back again from earth to 
heaven. 

The action of the individual iron particles on 
the sheet of paper in their final adjustment when 
rid of friction and their own inertia or weight and 
under magnetic influence, is typical of the actions 
of every God-loving man ; for he, like they, must 
get into line, and the poles of his being must point 
heavenward. And on this magnetic field of earth 
the infinite magnetic curves, all of which were 
drawn by supreme artist-hands, what a phenome- 
non, beautiful even for God himself to look at, 
must be its Christians, each in line and with face 
turned toward Him ! 



II 

THE ABSOLUTE AND THE INFINITE. 

BSOLUTE zero ('< absolute'' meaning per- 
fected, completed) is the most marvelous 
and in many respects incredible state or 
condition known to science ; and yet a state scien- 
tificallv true and correct. This is proven by a 




NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 



Centigrade thermometer, whose scale markings 
begin at zero — the freezing point of water — and 
go upward to one hundred degrees — boiling w^ater 
point — and beyond. Markings below zero may be 
made by the proportionate amount of decrease in 
a given volume of gas. Gas decreases its volume 
2-^3 for each degree of heat withdrawn. If this 
volume, through heat reduction, is decreased thus 
two hundred and seventy-three times, gas would 
show no volume at all. There can be thus no 
markings below this. The marking at this point 
would show minus two hundred and seventy-three 
degrees ( — 273 degrees) or — 460 degrees Fah- 
renheit thermometer. And this point two hun- 
dred and seventy-three degrees below^ zero point 
of Centigrade thermometer, and which is called 
absolute zero, is finality — the perfected, finished, 
completed, absolute! This is the lowest tempera- 
ture which the nature of heat admits of; and since 
it is the motion of particles within a body that 
constitutes heat (the greater the agitation the 
greater the heat), then we can easily see that here 
at absolute zero there would be no agitation of 
particles ; hence there would be absolute rest and 
naught but the quiet and stillness of the grave. 
This is the unthinkable region of negation. It is 
the hopeless realm of absolute despair. Science 
will never reach it ; science indeed has as yet reached 



THE ABSOLUTE AND THE INFINITE 7 

no farther than about fifty degrees above absolute 
zero, and the freezing of hydrogen gas into a solid 
state, down in those deepest depths of cold, recently 
filled the world with amazement. 

But think now! From this — 273 degrees' 
point on our Centigrade thermometer, — and where 
markings and thermometer all must stop, this 
negative, lifeless, without heat point, — from this 
point we can read upward till we reach the zero 
point ; and then on and on and higher and higher 
and higher. Indeed and in truth we would never 
scientifically stop. Upward on our thermometer 
lies the highway of the infinite. And all along 
this way, from the standpoint of heat, is life, which 
is the agitation of particles. And the way too is 
full of beauty and marvels. At sundry and definite 
points all the various and solid metals, one by 
one, succumb and fall into liquid state; and farther 
on these liquid states are transformed into gases. 
(Think of two worlds crashing together in space 
and of a developed heat so great that both worlds 
would be changed into gas !) Above our absolute 
zero and on our thermometer scale science has 
gone upward only between three thousand five 
hundred to four thousand degrees Centigrade, or six 
thousand or seven thousand degrees Fahrenheit. 

At this extreme high point, to-day science is 
melting clay and forming aluminum, and small 



8 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

diamonds out of carbon and rubies and sapphires 
are there being made. Along in these tempera- 
tures the world itself was formed ; mountains were 
thrown up, and depressions or hollows made for 
the seas. Melted gold and silver and tin and lead 
were run into crevices of the rocks, and all the 
army of crystals of glittering face and of diversi- 
fied form and of beautiful color were made. It 
required these extreme temperatures, as I have 
said, for nature to form the world and fill it with 
metals and gems. 

And, since heat is motion and temperature is 
measured by the rapidity of this motion, then what 
an infinite agitation and vibration of particles there 
must have been at the time of earth's formation ! 
To-day thousands of horse power, conveyed as 
electricity over a copper wire, can be converted 
into heat between the two tips of carbon elec- 
trodes and there work wonders. Possibly in this 
great heat, and through this well-nigh infinite agi- 
tation of particles, all the precious gems may yet 
be turned out in a workshop as easily and rapidly 
as are to-day toys and baubles. 

I do not know how much farther up this scale 
of the infinite — the scale of heat as marked by 
thermometers — man will go. Somehow I cannot 
help feeling that heat greater than six thousand or 
seven thousand degrees Fahrenheit, and which 



THE ABSOLUTE AND THE INFINITE 9 

from heat's stand-point is the greater Ufe, has 
much to do with and must have relations with 
other cycles of our life in the great beyond. 

Heat and love are correlated : take their every 
test and their every phenomenon and you will find 
this true. What one is in the physical world, so 
and such is the other in the world of spirit ; and 
you could set up in this higher realm the same 
thermometer with the same marking. Deep down 
yonder must be theoretically absolute zero, — which 
would note the entire absence of love, — a region 
lifeless, hopeless, of stillness, and without agitation 
or vibration of particles. 

In this hypothetical place, showing a theoretical 
marking of — 273 degrees, even God could not 
be, for God is love. Love's scale climbing ever 
and ever higher, reaches up into and is lost in the 
infinite. And all along love's scale is beauty and 
nobility and usefulness and heroism. Jesus has 
shown us somewhere, perhaps at the six thousand 
or seven thousand degrees Fahrenheit point, what 
the human being should be. If this degree of heat 
in the physical world forms a new earth and makes 
diamonds, rubies, and sapphires, then can six thou- 
sand degrees of love in the higher realm do less 
wonderful things.'* Beyond all peradventure 6,000 
Fahrenheit of love-heat would form an earthly 



lO NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

paradise, and fill it too with such beauty as our 
dull eyes have never seen. 

But there are still higher love markings than 
this — points now hidden and beyond our ken. So 
far as our vision can go, we have seen each new de- 
gree show individual phenomena; but what tran- 
scendent phenomena would ten thousand or fifteen 
thousand degrees of love-heat show ? Heaven 
would be worth the seeking if for no other pur- 
pose than to see what love-heat has there wrought ! 

Ill 

earth's chaos 



^'I^^^SIN the beginning was chaos.'* 
pin ^ There are words that are too strange or 
v^^S^ too great or too sacred to be translated. 
Hence they are handed down bodily from one lan- 
guage to another in their unique and original form. 
The Greek word '* chaos" is one of these. In the 
original its primary meaning is an empty infinite 
space, and secondarily it means an unorganized 
condition. 

The scientific idea of the earliest creative days 
is that the whole of our solar and planetary sys- 
tem was in a state of vaporous fire mist. The 
earth was still a part of this mist. It had not 



EARTH S CHAOS I I 



swung off into space as an elliptical body, and 
separate from the other planets. Therefore the 
Bible says that it was ** without form." This 
vaporous, or perhaps gaseous, space was infinitely 
extended (as is the fashion of gases), and so thin 
was the medium or body, that the Bible graphic- 
ally describes it as being *^void." Granted that 
this original chaos was an empty infinite space 
and containing nothing organized, then it was 
impossible that in it could be any such things as 
what we may now call matter, or force, or method. 

Now it is demonstrable that the earth, with its 
seventy-four or more elements, has gained or lost 
practically nothing since creation ; and that all 
the matter therefore which we see about us, in 
water, atmosphere, rocks, or in the organized and 
living forms of animal and plant life, must neces- 
sarily have been in and contained in that vaporous 
space. And though this earth to-day teems with 
infinite structure and organism and method and 
law, yet we know there could not have been found 
one single cell (the unit of all organic structure). 

What a faint idea we can have of that primeval 
condition ! And since too, we never have a clear 
conception of the meaning of any word till we 
hear it in its original place, then no human mind 
can ever know to its fullest the true significance 
of our Greek word chaos. And it is certain that 



12 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

since creative days we have had in the physical 
world no true exemplification of what chaos is. 
We go out into a neglected garden or field where 
crops are well-nigh obliterated with weeds and 
briers, or into a jungle teeming with miscellaneous 
wild plant life, and we call this place chaos, and 
this is as near as we can get to a modern exem- 
plification, multiply examples as we will. But 
how unlike this chaos of the garden was earth's 
primal chaos, where no two atoms (the smallest 
divisible part of matter), though made for each 
other, stood side by side or even in relative posi- 
tion. If all the united minds of earth had wit- 
nessed the primeval scene, there would not have 
been in one the faintest hope that in that space 
where all correlated atoms had been driven as far 
apart as the infinite energy of heat could drive 
them, a hand some day would collect and would 
lay each kindred atom beside its fellow, and so 
cell by cell would build a world ! 

And yet out of that chaos, in very truth, grew 
even paradise. And the perfection of form in 
matter, and the perfection of all the highest and 
sweetest forces in nature, and the perfection of 
law and love and method and harmony — these 
were all to be found in paradise. And I shall not 
believe that this paradise, in which even God took 
a delight to walk every day, was of a narrow con- 



EARTH S CHAOS 1 3 



tracted circumference down beside Euphrates' 
banks. God does not do things by halves or 
hundredths or millionths. It is easier to beheve 
that this paradise of earth — typical of the paradise 
of heaven — filled all of earth, just as this later 
paradise is to fill all of heaven. 

If, fresh from the hands of its Maker and in all 
of its beauty and perfection, this earth were given 
into Adam's hands for keeping and preserving, 
and if he failed in the doing thereof, and if here 
and there to-day there is to be seen semblance of 
the chaos of old, then it is not God's fault ; go 
ask Adam ! God with a wave of his hand did not 
simply substitute Eden for chaos. Chaos and 
Eden were antitheses ; and they were so far apart 
that even God himself chose to take ages for the 
evolving of the one out of the other. 

And no more striking example of antithesis is 
there in all the Bible than that in which Abraham, 
from the pure and ethereal heights of heaven, 
looked upon gross, sensual, and material Dives, and 
said, " Between us and you there is fixed a great 
chaos.'* It was Eden looking back upon the fire 
mist that was without form and void : for material- 
ism, selfishness, sensualism — these are all chaos. 

A man's mind is in a condition more or less of 
chaos according to the degree that he is build- 



14 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

ing it up constructively, and according to method. 
Mental chaos would mean a mind without form or 
purpose, vacant and unorganized. God made men 
for heaven. The trend of man's life, construct- 
ively, should be toward heaven, as was the trend 
of ancient earth toward Eden. God has not left 
out of one single man the germ of a high and noble 
life. Every man has within him the elements and 
the power to turn away from or toward chaos. 

I know that men, in times seemingly more than 
usually chaotic, despair of a future for humanity 
and government. But God sees possibilities 
where men see despair. From the beginning in 
ancient chaos God saw a possible Eden. Indeed, 
God must look at every man in the light of possi- 
bilities. And as he wrought chaos into paradise, 
how he must yearn that all men should likewise 
be builded up into their possibilities ! 

IV 
earth's awakening 



HERE was a time when this earth was a 
mass, — chaotic, inert, and unanimate. 
For neither as a fire mist nor as a molten 
earth glowing at white heat — seemingly a star to 
all other creations — was it possible for our earth 



earth's awakening 15 

to contain cellular life. Nor was the time for 
organism yet upon it, even when the solid crust 
had formed ; nor afterward, when the cooled at- 
mosphere had condensed and had fallen in con- 
tinuous rain torrents and so made the oceans 
and seas. Darkness was yet upon the deep. 
But as on some early spring morning after a 
dark and gloomy winter the sun rises, and in 
response to his vibrations — though far off — the 
brown and dead meadows turn into living green, 
the tree buds swell and burst into leaf, flowers 
bloom, streams break their icy cerements, and all 
the birds break into universal chorus — in some 
such way, the sun rose and flung his first 
rays upon this globe, and cleared forever its at- 
mosphere of darkness. And in God's wise econ- 
omy, the sun may have done more; the far-away 
vibrations of his atoms may have caused earth's 
atoms of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, to oscil- 
late and form into groups (as a magnet forms beau- 
tiful pictures out of iron filings when under its in- 
fluence), and thus perhaps earth's dull matter may 
have been first thrilled into organic life ! When 
we consider some of the daily phenomena about 
us, it may not seem so strange that an atom on 
this earth should vibrate in response to another 
atom on another sphere with which it is in reso- 
nance. There is nothing more interesting in the 



1 6 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

sciences of electricity and sound than that certain 
atoms do electrify and incite into action other and 
distant atoms. Those distant and attenuated 
voice-sounds that you hear — two or three at a 
time — are currents from other wires that at no 
point touch your own telephone wire. Of all the 
thousands of incandescent lights in your city, 
there is not one whose wires lead back into any 
electro-dynamo or other source of power. This 
lighting" is done solely by means of an induced 
current made by its own wires being placed near 
other and live wires. And because atoms, in cer- 
tain live wires, incite into activity atoms in con- 
tiguous dead wires, hence the costly insulation of 
wires. 

Various other phenomena, similar to the fore- 
going in electricity, are akin to phenomena which 
we find in the matter of sound. I uttered a cer- 
tain note in our music-room the other day, and the 
damper in my Calcutta self-feeder moved in its 
socket and turned the stove's heat on. Piano 
players know how often a certain note on the 
piano causes the gas globes or other similar things 
in the room to rattle and sing. I have often heard 
an organ note cause a church window of two hun- 
dred pounds weight to vibrate so violently that 
there was danger that the window would be 
broken. 



EARTHS AWAKENING 1/ 

Every pianist knows that the various strings in 
a piano are not solely to produce many distinct 
and separate musical notes. He knows that if he 
strikes one key the sound that he hears comes not 
from that one note, but that he hears the tones 
from octave strings and over-tones of the twelfths 
and fifteenths, etc. The piano as an instrument, 
as well as other musical instruments, would be of 
trifling value if dead strings did not awaken into 
sympathetic life and sing in harmony with the one 
note struck. 

There is still another added strange phenomenon 
to be seen in sound. Hold a vibrating tuning-fork 
over a glass partly filled with water, and when the 
air in the glass is in resonance with the fork, the 
glass and fork will both sing ; but the tone of the 
fork will become greatly reinforced and augmented. 
All of these things go to show that even in dull 
matter about us one atom in action may arouse 
other atoms into similar action ; and that all parts 
of this universe may be correlated. Even in dull 
matter we find that no atom can live to itself, and 
no atom can die to (or separate) itself. 

There are those about us who are psychically 
magnetic. They have the power to gather friends 
to themselves, and they have the good power to 
influence and sway others. One can almost see 

B 



1 8 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

the atoms of their lives in vibration, and can 
almost see the induced and responsive and unison 
vibrations in the lives of others. Such a man 
stands in analogous relations to the vibrating live 
wire that begets an induced current in other wires 
that light up a thousand lamps. He is the vibrat- 
ing note in the piano, that induces a multitude of 
other notes to sound. We have a similar effect 
when at the end of an exquisite and thrilling solo 
a great chorus catches the singer's vibrations and 
responds in mighty refrain. No man who does not 
himself vibrate with thought or feeling or love or 
action, and who thus has no power to induce 
similar motion in others, need ever stand in pulpit, 
or on forum, or attempt to lead an army or a host 
into any undertaking. 

Think you it is strange that God's notes of 
love that have been sounding in human ears for 
thousands of years should not meet certain re- 
sponse ? Is it strange that humanity should thus 
thrill into life and into love and into action ? If 
the water in the glass is not of just the right 
height, the glass will not sing in response to the 
tuning fork. Is there not thus an obligation 
resting upon us to put ourselves into such rela- 
tions to God — in other words, to put ourselves in 
tune with the infinite God, so that our lives will 
vibrate with his life, and so that we shall think 



CARBON 19 



his thoughts and do his works ! In this way our 
poor lives will be lifted up and glorified ; and as 
the sound of the tuning fork is augmented in some 
such way, so shall the vibrations of our lives give 
added glory and power even to the infinite One ! 

The word heaven means harmony ; and hell is 
an old English word meaning to surround one's 
self with a w^all, to separate one's self. Think, 
then, of God's thoughts and words far up in the 
highest, inducing responsive notes in the thirds 
and fifths and octaves and twelfths and fifteenths 
and thirty-seconds — think of all life in heaven 
vibrating in harmonious and swelling chorus to 
God's every thought ! He who walls himself in, 
and who separates himself so that no vibration of 
his shall ever reach others in helpfulness, and to 
whom no vibration of others shall ever penetrate 
and so arouse into action, is already in hell. 

V 

CARBON 

|HE organic bodies of animals and plants 
formed the crowning point of creation's 
evolution. As an aggregation of gaseous 
matter infinitely extended, as a fluid mass, or lastly 
as a sphere composed and made up of inanimate 




20 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

matter, the earth in all of these states was matter 
without life — was dead. 

But a new era has come. There now appear 
organic bodies — artificial structures consisting of 
parts with a common life and mutually dependent 
and having functions, each of which is essential 
to the existence of the whole. Concurrent with 
organic bodies we find a new elementary substance 
hitherto unknown : not earthy, not stone, not 
metallic, and yet it is confounded with all of these. 
Its name is carbon. 

Carbon is the foundation of creation's organized 
structures. Reduce the body, in the absence of 
air, of any animal or plant by fire in a crucible to 
its last reduction, and you arrive at the element 
carbon. The animal or vegetable body in its last 
analysis is carbon. When God, in the latter days, 
entered upon the creation of organic structure, he 
necessarily took first carbon. Carbon was a prime 
necessity for the creation of all of these higher 
forms that contain life. 

Chemically pure carbon possesses these charac- 
teristic qualities. It is odorless and tasteless ; it 
is infusible and eternally changeless so far as fur- 
ther reduction is concerned, and it is therefore 
indestructible. It cannot be acted upon by acid 
or other reagents or solvents. What beautiful 
qualities these are ! How they place carbon at 



CARBON 21 



once in the highest places, and as a changeless, 
eternal thing among the immortals ! 

The diamond, the hardest of all substances, and 
with faces as bright as shining planets, is com- 
posed of carbon in a crystallized state. Diamond 
remains unchanged in hydrogen gas, no matter 
how great heat may be applied ; but placed be- 
tween the carbon poles of an electric battery it 
swells up and is converted into a black mass of 
graphite. 

Graphite, formed in lumps in crystalline rock 
formations, is another modification of carbon. It 
is steel-gray in color, oily to the touch, and is used 
in making cedar pencils, crucibles, preventing rust 
on iron, and in the lessening of friction. 

Charcoal and lampblack contain carbon, though 
mostly in a largely impure state. Gas carbon, 
found as a hard gray mass in the upper portion of 
gas retorts, is one of the purest forms of charcoal. 
Possibly the most pure form is charcoal made from 
white sugar heated in a platinum basin. The char- 
coal of commerce is made by placing wood on end 
and covering it with earth so as to prevent too free 
combustion. Holes at the bottom and top of the 
earth and a space up the middle of the wood are 
left. The wood is then set on fire and allowed 
to burn just enough to drive off all gaseous mat- 
ter. The earthen covering is then removed. 



22 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

Mining coal is an impure carbon. It is formed 
wherever vegetation decays in the earth in the 
absence of air. Coke is the residue of bituminous 
coal heated to redness in the absence of air. It 
gives a high temperature and no smoke, and is 
used in iron smelting. Animal charcoal, or bone- 
black, made by charring bones in an iron cylinder, 
is used in chemistry as the best means of clarify- 
ing the more costly yet impure substances. If 
red wine is run through bone-black it comes out 
colorless. Alcohol filtered through it loses all of 
its fusil oil odor. Bone-black (as well as wood 
charcoal) absorbs unpleasant odors. It not only 
absorbs the odors, but it oxidizes and actually de- 
stroys them. For this purpose trays of heated 
charcoal are frequently placed in hospital wards. 
In most filtering plants charcoal is the main con- 
stituent. 

Now when we unite carbon with other sub- 
stances we enter upon an infinite field for study. 
The class known as the hydro-carbons is especially 
interesting, — the simplest, best-known illustration 
being illuminating gas, which is made by uniting 
carbon and hydrogen. 

In thought the world may have always placed 
carbon among the very lowly things. And yet, 
as we have seen, in its simple form and in its 
combinations it gives to the world heat, light, 



4 



CARBON 



23 



beauty, and priceless worth. Carbon in every 
case is the primal indestructible base or founda- 
tion upon which all organized structures in the 
greatest of God's earthly kingdoms stand. What 
a value has God thus placed upon it ! 

Truth is the carbon of the moral world. 

Without truth there cannot be any life whatso- 
ever in the moral world. Imagine a world in 
which truth has never entered ! When truth 
enters into a man a living creature is made, and 
God and angels rejoice as much thereat as Crea- 
tion rejoiced over Adam's birth. Take your busi- 
ness, your profession, your daily work, or study, 
or word, or thought, and combine it with truth, 
and life at once becomes the bright and loving 
thing, the beautiful thing, the royally rich thing, 
that God meant it to be. Truth is the basis of 
the moral life. The moral life can have no other 
foundation. Truth is indestructible. It cannot 
be attacked and destroyed. Fire cannot burn it. 
Acid cannot eat it, nor can any solvent cause its 
dissolution. 

The Bible tells of a new earth. Carbon will 
surely be there, for carbon cannot be destroyed. 
It tells of a new heaven ; truth will surely be 
there, for truth cannot be destroyed. The most 
recent science demonstrates as a fact that the sun 



24 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

is surrounded with a complete envelope of carbon. 
Even the inconceivable fires of this great luminary 
cannot destroy this carbon envelope. In some 
such way God has wrapped truth about this uni- 
verse. The fires of hell will not prevail against it. 
That timid soul fearing that truth will perish from 
the face of the earth, has little conception of the 
absolute indestructible quality of truth. 

If carbon, which is the chief constituent of the 
organized bodies, differentiates these bodies from 
clods and stones, then it is truth that differentiates 
some men from other men, and differentiates too, 
angels from demons. 

VI 

NATURE^S EQUILIBRIUM 

|UT in the grass and sedge fields there is a 
certain pathos and sadness in the fading 
out of the living green into the sere and 
yellow. But nature knows how to fit and suit her 
changes to new conditions. In nature the one 
thing is always the complement of the other. The 
bark, the leaf, the flower and the fruit of every 
bush, plant, or tree all bear colors each of which 
is complementary to the others. No harlequin is 
ever born or evolved out of nature, 




NATURES EQUILIBRIUM 2$ 

And so it is if we should look out in a January 
freezing northeaster and see only green verdure 
on all sides, that we would doubly shiver as we 
thought of the living grass or leaves so sorely be- 
set and encompassed by the cruel emissaries of 
the snow or ice king. It is more comfortable to 
look out in the storm upon hedges that are yellow 
and brown; and we say to ourselves then of the 
cold winter's storm, '' It cannot now hurt them." 
And we say to ourselves too, as we hear in mid- 
winter the creaking of the heavily laden limbs of 
the trees, and hear the cracking and crashing of 
the falling ice that erstwhile encased them, ''I am 
glad that the summer leaves are not there.'' 

And as I look out upon a snowy world and hear 
no cheery bird songs, I am glad then that nature 
gave her feathered tribes that strange sense of 
migration that sends them southward betimes into 
balmy and sunny climes. And my heart — and my 
bread crumbs too — go out in the snowy storm to 
the bright-eyed, wee bit of flufifiness unfortunately 
belonging to the can't-get-aways, that I know 
must be frozen to his very marrow bones. I am 
glad there is a southland somewhere for all the 
birds, and at the first voice or touch of winter I 
would be the first to urge them thither, to hie 
away and begone, even though it did take, for me, 
all the songs out of the trees. When I see the 



26 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

ground all hid with snow, then I am not sorry that 
all the birds are gone. 

Just what all the furry tribes, for which nature 
must prepare warm beds, would do if grass re- 
mained green all the year I do not know. 

The dried and bent-over grasses in all the fields 
to-day look as if they all were warming and shel- 
tering some hidden animal life. A rabbit never 
has, at any other time, half so good and warm a 
bed as he has in December or January. With my 
dogs I have routed many a cotton-tail on a frosty 
morning out of his burrow, and have allowed him 
unpursued to run affrighted out of my sight, 
while I stayed behind to marvel at the snug-fitting 
and warm bed that he had left behind. And many 
a winter's day have I lain by the half-hour deep 
hidden in the thick and tall brown broom sedges, 
as sheltered and as comfortably warm as if blan- 
ket-wrapped. 

And so careful is nature to suit all life to 
changed conditions, and to make constantly a har- 
monious whole, and to keep all things in a state of 
safe and continuous equilibrium, that she even 
changes in mid-winter the color of the hair upon 
the backs of our furry friends ; and she puts to 
sleep, at a time when food would be hard to get, 
her large family of dormants. 

Nature, more than you and I and all others. 



NATURES EQUILIBRIUM 



understands the true relation of all things. Na- 
ture is using on this earth a million balance-wheels 
to keep these relationships steady and true. The 
natural life about us seems but one constant ka- 
leidoscope of color and form, yet they smoothly 
merge the one into the other and fit like tongue 
and groove. 

If nature did not watch and know relationships, 
if she allowed, for example, winter to rush through 
creation like an express train, and if she did not 
previously send the birds and many fishes into a 
safe and far distance, or if she did not put certain 
slow-footed dormants to sleep in sheltered nooks 
and crannies, then just what would happen, tell 
me, to a large part of animal life ? In all the 
seasons and times we find new but harmonious 
equilibriums, for nature's balance-wheels are ever 
turning. 

Man*s history is the story of the actions of 
human beings who are adjusting themselves in 
some way or other to changed environments and 
conditions. We all daily adjust ourselves to new 
issues, and to that new view which the diurnal 
change of the kaleidoscope presents. We are 
constantly endeavoring to maintain a certain kind 
of harmony or fitness or equilibrium. Not to do 
this would soon leave us as forlorn and wretched 



28 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

as is the poor bird in snowy midwinter, that did 
not know enough at the proper time to fly away 
(and ahead of the cold) to the southland. That 
man who does not fit tongue and groove to his 
environment, and is out of sympathy and out of 
mind and heart with the times and with all about 
him, is as lonely as would be a green leaf on the 
ice-encased branch of an oak tree in January. 

Strike your tuning fork, O doubting man, upon 
this terrestrial crust, and listen in all the varied 
stages of earth's evolution ; first a fiery mist, then 
a molten ball, then the congealing of a thin crust, 
then the formation and separation of continents 
and seas, and then the laying therein of the foun- 
dations of life whose variety and numbers to-day 
no one can conceive. Do you not hear a con- 
stantly ascending note — a note that is ever finer 
and sweeter and more ethereal ? God during all 
of the ages has been fitting the world to new uses. 
And life on earth, animate and inanimate, has 
been all the while in a constant state of transition 
in order to suit earth's changed conditions. 

If the march of time, in planet, has had an 
upward and onward trend and a constant ascend- 
ing note, I do not doubt but that star and heaven 
and life upon and in them, in harmony with God's 
abiding thought concerning them, have gone on- 
ward in the same or greater ratio of change and 



I 

4 



\VHiERE EARTH S TRINITY MEETS 20 

advancement. But always there have been adap- 
tation and adjustment and equilibrium. You and 
I are not fit to-day even for the life of ten years 
hence. You and I are not fit to-day for the life of 
other planet or sphere. But if God cares for the 
birds and sends them southv^ard, if he cares for 
the dormants and puts them to sleep, if he adapts 
the brown dried grasses in midwinter to suit the 
needs of the four-footed can't-get-aways, and even 
changes to warmer colors the fur of their pelts, 
then will he not by as much more, keep you, O 
man, and keep you too in constant equilibrium 
with those changed conditions that must constantly 
and forever arise in the great beyond ? 

VII 

WHERE earth's TRINITY MEETS 

JHENEVER blind force meets blind force 
there is apt to be the clash and crash of 
opposing forces. I do not always so find 
it down here at the sea s side, where three great 
kingdoms, earth's trinity, — the land, sea, and sky, 
— meet and mingle. Even more so than with the 
land does the sky, meeting the sea, melt lovingly 
into it. Though to-day is fair, and though it is 
clear landward, it is just a bit hazy off at sea, and 



30 NATURE IN" THE WITNESS-BOX 

at no great way from shore the sky and sea seem 
to meet, the horizon is almost blotted out, and I 
scarcely know whether that tiny boat out there is 
sailing in the sea or through a tinted sky. At 
night the line of demarcation is still more dim, 
and many a night at sea I haye spent hours with 
the lookout in peering into the no great distance 
ahead trying to find the horizon line, and per- 
chance to see some black object outlined against 
the whiter sky. And for whole days at sea I haye 
seen the sky and sea locked fast in an embrace, 
and haye sailed thus through fog so thick that the 
tops of our masts were inyisible. 

And so it is that sky and sea seem faster friends 
than land and sky. Who can tell of the mist out 
there, if it be the mists of the sea rising to meet 
the sky, or the mists of the sky falling to meet 
the sea. And stranger than all of this is the fact, 
that all day long by the sun and all night long by 
the moon, the sky, like some great artist brooding 
oyer wide worlds, is tracing and penciling lines 
across, and is painting in ten thousand varying 
tints and colors the surface of the sea. From gen- 
eration to generation, from cycle to cycle, these 
two great kingdoms haye liyed like loyers ; now 
rising on the one part and now falling on the sec- 
ond part to embrace and kiss. And when on 
clearer days they withdraw, who shall say which 



WHERE EARTHS TRINITY MEETS 3 I 

of the two is the more loving and true — the over- 
hanging one with heavenly brush painting the sur- 
face of the other with beauteous colors, or the sea 
that knows no greater tribute to pay to her sky- 
lover than simply to reflect from her own face the 
beauties that she sees in the concave above ? 

In some such loving, gentle way do also the 
land and sea meet, the sky bending over all. 
Forty miles or more from the coast, as you ap- 
proach the sea, you observe evidences of a change. 
The pine gives way to cypress and bay ; the soil 
looks darker ; the rivers too are black and slug- 
gish ; we find no more hills, but in their place is a 
level plain cut into by frequent bayous and swamps 
and marshes. All attempt of cultivation of the 
land soon ceases — the only growth being marsh- 
grass and myrtle bushes. In all the water-runs 
we see evidences of the last high tide. Now and 
then in the freshening breeze we get a whiff of 
salt in the air. On all sides we begin to note the 
encroachments of the sea, but so gently does the 
land blend into the sea, and the sea into the land, 
that we look in vain for some line of demarcation. 

Our train passes through a clump of stunted, 
battered live oaks, and rounding a curve there in 
plain sight lies a wide stretch of white sands, with 
the blue sea beyond ! In all of Christendom there 
is no more debatable territory than these same 



32 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

white sands. Cast up ashore originally out of the 
depths of the sea, tossed hither and thither by 
winds, covered half of the time by ocean's waters, 
and appearing for the other half to be veritably a 
part and portion of the land, it would seem that 
land and sea without legal controversy as to true 
possessive rights had decided simply in truest 
equity to divide time ; and so it is that for twelve 
hours out of twenty-four these sands belong to the 
realm of the sea, and for twelve hours they are a 
part of the dominion of the land. One would 
look in vain for a more fair and more loving con- 
cession and yielding, the one to the other. 

Crossing the sands and encountering the sea, 
we find notwithstanding the burly, good-natured 
roar of the bar that this great ocean in its actual 
contact with the land is so shallow and so gentle 
in its ways that a child's feet can safely wade 
therein. 

Sometimes it would appear as if the one realm 
had indeed invaded and had stolen goods from the 
other, but more truthfully it would seem that it 
had been a matter of mere gleeful playfulness, for 
I never saw the sea carry a log from the shore but 
that it left behind and in its place a whole heap of 
pearly shells ! 

Not more strange and curious are the phenomena 
that we find in the easy gradations leading out of 



WHERE EARTHS TRINITY MEETS 33 

the one kingdom of this great trinity into another 
than in the change or transformation that takes 
place here in animal life. To the birds that we 
find on the beaches have as a rule been given 
either long legs for wading or web feet for swim- 
ming. And that great host of other animals, 
crabs, oysters, turtles, scallops, clams, fiddlers, and 
many more besides — it seems (so fitted are they for 
both conditions) to make but little moment to these 
whether they are high and dry on land, or are, on 
the other hand, submerged under the waters of 
the sea. 

Not more easily do the seasons fade, the one 
into the other, or night into day and day into 
night, than does the land fade into the sea and 
the sea into the sky, or the reverse. There seems 
to be nowhere contention, nowhere a clash and a 
clatter and a call to arms between the powerful 
forces of earth's trinity, but the rather, like lovers 
three, hand in hand, united and undivided they go 
to make up earth's beauty and shapeliness and 
fruitfulness. 

Like an iceberg at sea, cold and chilling and 
crushing anon into the great world's sailing craft 
or into other fellow-icebergs, do some people meet 
and jostle and overwhelm their fellow-brother man. 
They make no concessions to him. They do 



34 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

not meet him ever half-way, and they never give 
and take. They do not recognize any neutral or 
debatable ground. Not so the man, who himself a 
part of a great trinity — part human, part divine, 
part earth — blends into and goes hand in hand 
with the other two kingdoms about him, or the in- 
dividuals thereof. Blessed on earth among men 
is he, around and about whom is the equivalent of 
the beach by the sea — an area filled with gentle 
ways and many concessions and much good-will. 

If Christ had never come into the world and 
become human, and thus by this easy gradation 
had blended, for man, heaven into earth and earth 
into heaven — if God that day on Ararat's summit 
had given there his last message to the world and 
had gone back to heaven there to await the final 
coming to him of mankind — how different then 
would life and the future seem to you and me ! 



VIII 

nature's great AND SMALL 

|0 throughout nature and find me, if you 
can, one thing that could claim superior- 
ity over its fellows. The world to-day 
could not decide as to which is the fairest flower, 
the most delectable fruit, the most charming land- 




NATURES GREAT AND SMALL 35 

scape, or the handsomest shrub or tree; nor could 
nature herself decide the matter. The infinite 
number of created material things is not half so 
wonderful as the infinite variety in form, color, 
and quantity. Nature never made two things 
that you might set up, side by side, in compari- 
son. Neither from a scientific nor an artistic 
standpoint is the granite mountain any greater 
than is the humble lichen that clings to its side. 
They are in truth made different in order that 
you might not compare them. Consider if you 
will the immensity of the Atlantic and all of the 
life therein. Yet if you will let water, in which 
dead plants have been placed, stand for a week 
in an aquarium the aquarium will be filled with 
just as much active and disporting life as is yon- 
der sea full of fishes. One drop of water filled 
with animalculae, under a microscope, becomes a 
veritable sea ! Take from out of that drop of 
water one single germ, and make it the source 
and fountain head of a bubonic plague, or a yel- 
low fever scourge, and would not that drop of 
water seem as full of potency as is the sea with 
all of its monsters ? 

The blooming magnolia forests of South Geor- 
gia, the great stretches of tree-like oleanders on 
our coast islands, the blooming orange or lemon 
groves of Florida, the apple orchards in spring in 



36 NATURE IN THE WJTNESS-BOX 

New England, the luxuriant poppy and tulip farms 
of Holland, the mountain tops of Switzerland 
covered in summer time with Alpine roses or 
daisies — as we wander through each in turn, we say : 
"This surely is the best/\ But is ''the best '' any 
better after all than is the humble violet bed at 
our door, that smiles up at us as we pass or 
breathes out to us its perfume by way of welcome ? 

The South brings her cotton, the Middle States 
their corn, the West her wheat. New England her 
potatoes, Japan her rice, France her vines, and 
China her silk, and each one says : " Lo ! mine is 
king ! '' But there is no king. Nature made the 
material things of creation, each one a unit. She 
endowed each with an individuality and a singu- 
larity all its own. Each thing was to have its own 
place in nature's economy. So far as we know, 
each one was as necessary as the other. And in 
growth nature tries as hard to develop a little 
umbrella tree as she does a hundred foot poplar 
or pine. 

The rock for a pave, the wood for our house, the 
coal for fuel, the wheat for bread, the peach for 
fruit, the grape for wine, the rose for sweetness, 
the snow and the lily for purity, the water for 
drink, the grass for the world's green carpet — 
with each as necessary as the other, who shall say 
which is the greatest ? Yonder mountain or for- 



nature's great and small 37 



est with all their size and bigness, would have 
gladly exchanged places, the one with the little 
stone that from David's sling slew Goliath, and 
the other with one of the palm branches that lay 
in Jesus' path as he entered Jerusalem. 

There shall come a day in the further develop- 
ment of the telephone and the telescope when we 
shall no more use the term '' distance." It is only 
ignorance that in nature's domain ever uses the 
terms "great and small." Each precious bit or 
portion of material life was made by nature for a 
specific and for a wise purpose ; and in nature's 
heart I am sure there is no first and no last and 
no last and no first ! 

Between men, each of whom is fulfilling his 
mission in life, there can be no comparison made. 
Each, because he is filling his place, is carrying 
out God's plan. Angels do no more. If, there- 
fore, one should despise his neighbor or look 
haughtily down upon him, or by any means exalt 
himself in his presence, and if perchance that 
neighbor were carrying out in his life God's mind 
and purpose — just what would be God's thought 
of him } If we who are trying so hard to fill our 
barns and our private safety vaults with material 
things (as the savage would gather together beads 
and brass trinkets), and if we should use these 



38 NATURE IX THE WITNESS-BOX 

material things (never meant for comparisons) as 
an index to point how high up in the scale of life 
w^e are and above our fellows, just what would 
be God's thoughts of us ? And because it is a 
law in the kingdom of spirit that ^'Whoever of 
you will be chiefest shall be servant of all," then 
if we should fail to realize that we are to-day living 
in the kingdom of spirit and not in the fleshly and 
material kingdom, and that we are bound by all its 
laws, and if we should erect barriers about our- 
selves or set ourselves on pinnacles, then just what 
would be God's thoughts about us ? 

Does heaven seem any the less heaven to you 
because there will be no material objects up there 
possecGing size or proportion or value or strength 
by which you can measure your worth, and so desig- 
nate for yourself some high place among your fel- 
low^s ? 



IX 

nature's invisible and hidden things 

JHE world is apt to look upon nature as 
being manifestations put wholly and only 
into material forms. These forms all 
have shape with length and breadth and thick- 
ness ; they all have weight and are visible. We 




NATURES INVISIBLE AND HIDDEN THINGS 39 

see them and touch them and feel them. They 
appeal to some or all of our various senses. They 
may have beauty or otherwise ; they are rough or 
smooth ; large or small ; hot or cold ; they may be 
heavy or light, or sweet or sour. We can divide 
them. We can analyze them. We can put them 
into crucibles and burn them. Acids will eat them 
up. By many and varied tangible means we know 
that they all have an individual entity. If you 
were to attempt to deny this your various senses 
would rise up and demand of you the truth. 

But nature in her realm has her intangible, her 
imponderable, her invisible, and her occult things. 
We know of these things only through their effects. 
As to the things themselves, so far as our senses 
are concerned, they are matters of faith. 

As wide as is the earth itself is the field of ter- 
restrial magnetism. The fact of its existence is 
shown by the individual dip of the needle at any 
and every point on the globe. Indeed, these elec- 
tric currents in the earth's crust are so great, 
especially during periods of sun-spots, sun-storms, 
and of the Aurora Borealis, that Jthey render tele- 
graphing signally unintelligible. Yet there could 
be nothing farther from the material than is this 
magnetic field of force. What, indeed, is there 
tangible and visible in the whole question of mag- 
netism } You might magnetize your knife blade 



40 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

SO that it would attract a needle, or an iron or 
steel nail, but you would have added nothing to 
the weight or appearance of your blade. The 
added force you gave to it could not be deter- 
mined by any means except through the effect of 
this force. And by and by, when your knife blade 
gradually loses its magnetic powers, no known sci- 
ence by mere examination of the blade could dis- 
cover any loss whatever. 

Now the same is true of electricity. No one 
has ever seen electricity. You send one or four 
or eight telegraphic messages over the same wire 
at the same time, and yet no earthly power could 
discover any material difference in the wire when 
carrying one message or eight messages, or for 
that matter no message at all. The electric gen- 
erator would show no material difference when it 
is alive with electricity and able to turn the 
machinery of a cotton mill than when it is noth- 
ing but a coil of inert wire. The miles and miles 
of feed wires through which at night runs the 
current that thrills a thousand arc lights that 
illumine a city, these wires, by every physical test 
known, would show no visible difference at night 
or by day. 

No force of earth is more universal than is 
gravitation. There is not a single terrestrial ob- 
ject that does not possess this attractive force for 



NATURES INVISIBLE AND HIDDEN THINGS 4 1 

all other objects. The most common of all phe- 
nomena is that of a falling body. Yet so impon- 
derable is this force that the world existed many 
thousands of years without knowing of its exist- 
ence. It was only in 1687 ^hat Sir Isaac Newton, 
arguing from effect to cause, first demonstrated 
the law of the attraction of gravitation. 

If it were not for affinity — that attraction that 
an atom has for another atom — there would be 
no such thing on this globe as a structural unit 
of any kind. If it were not for cohesion to bind 
together these structural units, then there would 
be likewise no such thing as homogeneous bodies. 
And yet who ever saw or handled either of these 
twin forces ? How do we know of their existence 
except that we see the effect of these forces in the 
building of the unit and the body ? 

And while this force called affinity attracts cer- 
tain atoms, there is also another force that repels 
atoms. Atoms under its influence fly apart, and 
yet what proof have we of the existence of this 
force except in the effects as seen by us ? 

The man, therefore, who in nature's realm would 
not recognize the existence of anything not per- 
ceived by his own senses would be an agnostic or 
an unbeliever in many of the most tremendous 
matters of this realm. 



42 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

Aside from all of the forces related above, what 
is there more intangible, imponderable, and mys- 
terious than are life and growth ? These too are 
forces, the grandest and strongest to be found in 
the kingdom of animals and plants, but what 
bodily sense could possibly take cognizance of 
either except by their effects ? Is God or heaven 
any less real because we do not see them, or be- 
cause our varied senses do not in anywise recog- 
nize them ? And for similar reasons are the 
operations of his Spirit, and is the work of the 
angelic spirits in this world any the less credible ? 

Shall we be allowed to argue from effect to cause 
in the natural world, and yet not be allowed to do 
this in the spiritual world ? Shall you be forbid- 
den to argue back from this great world of material 
and created things to its Creator ? And if ten 
thousand peoples about you show plainest evidence 
of a force that has uplifted and glorified their lives, 
shall you be forbidden to see in these things the 
work of the great Redeemer of mankind ? Shall 
you or I be an agnostic because we cannot under- 
stand things found in the spiritual realm ? Has 
any one yet ever understood magnetism, and why 
the needle hangs to my magnetized knife blade ? 
And yet is there any man who is wise who to-day 
is an unbeliever in, or a skeptic with reference to, 
magnetism ? 



NEW RELATIONSHIPS IN NATURE 43 

It requires some degree of faith on our part to 
believe that a telegram comes really from the sup- 
posed author. Who ever sees a message come or 
go, or sees it in transit ? God who has given us ten 
thousand evidences — and daily multiplying — and 
who is demanding of us, with reference to himself, 
unshaken and substantial faith, is not asking a 
thing that is unusual or strange or occult or hard ! 



X 

NEW RELATIONSHIPS IN NATURE 

|N Germany, so I am told by a native, it is 
usual for mothers to bathe their babies 
and little children in spinach water. A 
German, who underwent this regime for ten years 
of his child-life, told me that the effects of this 
queer bath are startlingly invigorating and sooth- 
ing. This reveals a strange and unthought-of re- 
lationship between spinach and babies. In the 
matter of exploiting new relationships between 
plant life and the human, Germany gives us fur- 
ther example. In no other country, perhaps, are 
plants which are designated as weeds, such as 
dandelion, dock, charlock, pig-weed, purslane, etc., 
so largely used as foods. And it is no small mat- 
ter to take a plant out of the class or order of 




44 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

weeds and place it in the category of foods, and 
so give it a new relationship to man, and one that 
it had never before borne. 

It is apparent that the moment any one thing 
takes another and double station in life and assumes 
a new relationship, it becomes thereby doubly use- 
ful and valuable. If a cornstalk with its ear had 
been made simply for standing up straight and 
looking handsome, life for it would have been 
simple enough. But since it can be made into 
meal, and some of it goes to the chickens and 
cows, and some of it goes into muffins and corn 
cakes or into hominy, or since it can be given 
whole as food for horses and hogs, or since it can 
be pressed into corn oil, or since it can be put into 
vats to come out corn whisky, high wines, or alco- 
hol, or since it can be made into starch or dextrine 
or glucose, why at the end of its row of possibili- 
ties corn becomes an exceedingly complex affair. 
But go farther and make a sub-division : take alco- 
hol, and since alcohol may be used as the men- 
struum that keeps and preserves the medicinal 
elements found in our tinctures, fluid extracts, 
tonics or patent medicines, or since it can be used 
in the manufacture of smokeless powder, why we 
see that corn has become a still more complex 
affair. Corn, in the form of smokeless powder, 
to-day hastens the rise and fall of nations and 



NEW RELATIONSHIPS IN NATURE 45 

stands in a relationship even to great governments 
never dreamt of a few years ago. 

As complex as corn is our Southern cotton seed. 
Its linters, hulls, cake, crude and refined oil, with 
each of their subdivisions and possibilities, place 
the parent seed on continual new ground and give 
to it new relationships as complex and ramifying 
as is a family tree. 

Scarcely a month goes by that some new pro- 
duct out of common coal-tar does not place this 
crude, black, rough product in a new relationship 
toward the medical and dyeing world. There was 
a time when the world believed that the only rela- 
tionship between the lightning and human beings 
was as a fiery, destructive dart, hurled from Jove's 
hand upon the heads of his enemies. But so 
radically different in effect is electricity when ap- 
plied to electric cars, or to lighting or heating, or 
telegraphing or cabling or telephoning, or in vita- 
scope work, that it would be well-nigh impossible 
to prove to an ancient Roman or Greek that these 
seeming different forces were after all nothing but 
lightning in new and varied relationships. 

It took the farmers of the South one hundred 
years to find out that there was any relationship 
between the phosphate beds of South Carolina, 
Florida, and Tennessee and their crops of corn 
and cotton and wheat. Yet the man who exploited 



46 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

that relationship did greater service to the South, 
and indeed to North America and to Europe, than 
if he had discovered gold mines in place of phos- 
phate beds. 

These illustrations prove that there are going on 
in the physical world continual developments that 
place objects in absolutely new positions and places. 
Equally true is it that no sooner does the object 
assume a new position than must all related objects 
treat it as if it were a new creation. 

The world is just finding out the infinite uses 
of material nature. And each new discovered use 
brings the world into one or more new relation- 
ships, and brings too, a new-found joy, and above 
all a new obligation. That man in the material 
world is the most learned and wise who has dis- 
covered the greatest number of relationships to 
himself and vice vei'sa ; and that man of all others 
is most ignorant whose life recognizes and com- 
prehends the fewest number of these relationships. 
The benefactors of the world are those who, dig- 
ging and delving in the twilight, bring to light all 
unknown and hitherto undiscovered things and 
point out their true relationships to humanity. 

Every Christian man is an expansionist. He 
could wish that he might clasp hands and hold 
loving relationships — if that were possible — with 



New relationships in nature 47 

every man living on this earth. He could wish 
that he might bear some relationship to every 
helpful and uplifting movement. Never is an 
inspiring word uttered or a noble deed done, but 
that each finds a response in his heart. 

And this Christian man is going about all the 
while leveling walls and barriers that men set up, 
and so is opening up relationships where none 
before existed. To call any man who builds a 
wall about his affections or his means or his time 
or his endeavors, and thus acknowledges no rela- 
tionships outside of those walls, to call such a man 
a Christian is a misnomer. The greatest expan- 
sionist that ever lived was Jesus Christ. He 
entered into active relationship with every soul 
that he met. He broke down more barriers and 
taught more about the brotherhood or kindredship 
of mankind than all other men besides. 

Heaven for each soul is a place of greater ex- 
pansion than earth, because heaven offers the 
greater number of relationships, and with less 
amount of disability surrounding each. And as 
each multiplied relationship brings new obligations, 
then that man who imagines heaven to be simply 
a place of individual rest and repose and enjoy- 
ment, has no right conception of the place that the 
expansionist Jesus Christ went hence to prepare. 

God could not be God if he did not feel related 



48 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

to every soul on earth and in heaven and outside 
of heaven. But relationships in order to be help- 
ful must be mutual. In God are centered greatest 
power and glory and wisdom and goodness. If 
you and I could find each day some new thing 
about God and so place him daily in a new rela- 
tionship to ourselves, why you and I could expand 
our lives indefinitely. Within what narrow con- 
fines must the soul of that man live who thinks of 
God in no other than the one relationship of 
Creator ! 



XI 



THE HORIZON 

|HE thing of greatest interest at sea and 
out of sight of land is not, as I see it, 
the waters, so beautifully blue or green 
or gray ; not the rolling tide-waves ; and not even 
the wave expansion in all of its immensity that lies 
stretched out around us ; but it is rather that cir- 
cular rim of the ocean, as level as carpenter's spirit 
level, and equi- distant from us, that we call the 
horizon. In all the earth no such perfect circle, 
and one so clear cut and well-defined, has ever 
been drawn. 

Strain our eyes as most we can, as we stand on 




THE HORIZON 49 



ship-board and survey the sea on every side, the 
horizon line is the extreme limit of our observa- 
tion. Between that and us is the sea and the 
knowable ; beyond is the great unknown, and the 
wisest sailor-lookout, as he paces the forward deck, 
looking sharply ahead with his well-trained eyes, 
sees with them no farther than you or I, and 
knows not a whit more than ourselves as to what 
lies beyond the horizon line. And the sailor is 
safe only because that horizon is in truth far away, 
and because between it and himself is a plain, open, 
and knowable sea, along whose highways he may 
map out safe lines for his ship. That he can 
widen that horizon line the sailor well knows, for 
he often at times of moment, either of great expect- 
ancy or of danger, climbs aloft and from the mast- 
head looks out upon a wider and greater circle than 
could be seen from the deck's level. But not 
always does the horizon line stand out clear and 
distinct, giving scope to the ship to forge ahead at 
swiftest speed. For no sooner does a fog creep 
up out of the sea than does the sailor's horizon line 
become restricted and shuts in upon him. Soon 
perhaps the distance between it and him becomes 
so small that he could not safely drive his ship 
ahead, and so he slows down and sounds the fog- 
whistle ; or when, perhaps, in dangerous latitudes, 
he stops his ship and throws out his anchor. 



50 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

The land, even on its most level plains or deserts, 
furnishes no such perfect horizon lines as does the 
sea. From even the most favored lofty spot the 
land line shows a jagged and rough outline against 
the sky. The line too is irregular in its distance, 
for it now recedes and now draws nearer to us. 
If we descend into a circular valley, the top of the 
hills about us, no matter how near they be, gives 
us the extreme limit of our horizon. Indeed, in a 
country of hills and trees we can scarcely say that 
we have a horizon line at all. And in a deep and 
unknown forest a man must either wander at ran- 
dom or remain still like the sailor in a fog. 

There appear oftentimes upon our horizon some 
strange unfinished outlines that make us almost 
wild to see beyond the line and into the unknown. 
Upon the shore of the ocean the other day I saw 
off sea a bit of white topmast sail. How I would 
have liked then to see beyond the horizon and have 
discovered how many masts had my ship, where 
from and whither bound, how many tons, and what 
her cargo, how long she had been out upon her 
voyage, and whether strictly a sailing ship or a 
steamer. On the night of that day I saw a bril- 
liant meteor fall out of the sky and sink out of the 
reach of my eyes below the horizon, and a little 
later, out of that same unknown, the great full, 
red moon came over the line and climbed heaven- 



THE HORIZON J I 



ward. Who knows what beauties and blessings 
and grandeur this same unknown has in store and 
in keeping for you and me and all the world ! 

Travel as fast as we may, and see and discover 
as much as we can, there is always a horizon line 
far ahead, and with all of its unseen and unknown 
things hidden from our sight. It were worth a 
man's life to travel to successive horizon lines, 
each step forward giving a new one, and so find 
out the unknown things that there await him. 

No two men on earth can have just the same 
horizon lines of life. Some live in the mists and 
fogs, some on mountain-tops, some in the circular 
valleys, and some at the topmast lookout. 

Some of us recognize the glories that lie in the 
unknown that are ours for the taking, and so travel 
fast and furiously to find them, while others drop 
sails and throw out anchor. The limit of the sight 
of some men is so narrow that they tread day after 
day in the self-same steps, and you can always 
know to-day what their thoughts will be to-mor- 
row. And God is watching out of heaven the 
narrow tread of some men's lives down on 
"'Change," or in the commercial office, or some 
who sit daily watching their lock-box in the bank fill 
up, or some others, for that matter, who do noth- 
ing else in life but follow the furrows in the field. 



$2 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

No man can map out safe lines for himself, and 
so, steering clear of other traveling barks and of 
wrecks, forge ahead as heaven intended that he 
should, without having beyond him a far-distant 
horizon line. And no man can live as heaven 
intended him to live who, at each day's dawn, does 
not cross yesterday's horizon line, and so pass into 
new fields of knowledge and wisdom. 

There is for every human being a horizon line 
which bounds his earthly life. That there is to 
this horizon a beyond, is just as sure and certain 
as that every horizon line on ocean's surface has 
also its beyond. God has not left his world wholly 
in darkness with reference to that unknown beyond, 
from which no traveler has returned to tell its 
story. And so we trust him for the mansions 
and for the home which he says are prepared for 
us, even though they lie beyond our line of vision. 

XII 

LANDMARKS 



N the immediate space above and about 
us, there are no way marks. Every por- 
tion of this space is like every other por- 
tion. Search as far as you might, and you would 
find here not one single distinguishing character- 



LANDMARKS 



53 



istic, and no specific object to mark locality. All 
space is unknowable and unnamable. 

The same is true of the great waste of the 
ocean. You might cross the Atlantic ten thou- 
sand times, and yet you could not remember, by 
waymarks, one single spot and so go again and 
search and find it out. In all of space environing 
this earth, and in all of the oceans wide, there is 
not a Mount St. Elias, not one Gay Head prom- 
ontory, not one Cape Cod or Cape Henry, and 
not one Washington or Bunker Hill monument. 

This is not true of earth, whose every acre, save 
the trackless desert, has its distinguishing object 
or feature of the landscape, which serves as a 
guide. Earth is, therefore, full of localities, places, 
and names. Eschewing the lines of latitude and 
longitude, we could map out the whole earth by 
means of landmarks, such as boundary stones, tall 
trees, walls or rock, uprising hills and mountains, 
and builded towns and cities. As the pyramids in 
Egypt, and the Matterhorn and Jungfrau in Switz- 
land, are landmarks and guides for scores of miles 
or more in every direction about them, so it is that 
we could find upon the world's physical map, in 
every square rod, some object great and distin- 
guishing enough to point out to the traveler a 
continuous and plain way. 

The landmark of a given locality is thus its glory, 



54 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

its hallelujah, aye, its very salvation! Without a 
landmark the place is unrecognizable and there- 
fore lost. All of the world's old landmarks re- 
moved, no traveler could go a mile. 

What a beautiful array of names do we find in 
earth! In all of it, to every known and notable 
spot and place and object which serves as a dis- 
tinguishing feature or landmark, has been given a 
name. These landmarks, with their well-known 
names, stand about us wherever we go, like the 
familiar names and faces of our immediate friends. 
It may be but a boulder, or a towering tree, or 
even a distinguishing bush, yet we greet them as 
friends as we pass them by. 

Oftentimes at sea, when nearing port, I have seen 
the ship's captain scanning for hours the water's 
horizon dead ahead to discover perchance the up- 
lifted form of some known object on the unseen 
land. For landmarks, when seen from sea, often 
take on ten or even one-hundred-fold in beauty 
and in value. And perhaps some day, under his 
system, Marconi's tall signaling poles will give 
through other senses than sight, landmarks to all 
the seas and from shores to shores ! 

And beyond this world's circumambient space 
and far up in limitless ether, God has set great 
shining stars and worlds — waymarks of the skies ! 
The North Star, everywhere the sailor's friend 



LANDiMARKS 55 



and the friend of all who travel by night, is doubly 
blessed among this host of the starry zones, be- 
cause it gives you not only direction but also lati- 
tude. Perhaps in that dark abysmal ether-sea, to 
all angels and other spirits in their travels, these 
flaming stars serve as do lighthouses to the sailors 
of the earth. And one wonders what may be the 
angel-names for Southern Cross, Orion, and Plei- 
ades, and other constellations ! 

As God is the glory of heaven, so man is the 
hallelujah of earth. The human world, like all 
other worlds, has its distinguishing and monumen- 
tal objects. Every Saul of Tarsus, towering above 
his fellows in science, in mechanics, in theology, 
in works of humanitarianism, or in other field of 
human thought and activity, serves the world as a 
waymark, and stands for all, in some degree, that 
the Great Pyramid represents in Egypt, the Mat- 
terhorn in Switzerland, or the North Star in the 
heavens. Men in this world stand out as do 
objects in the earth's physical maps — some small 
and some great. You can travel backward five 
thousand years or more, in history, by noting the 
laurel-crowned names of each century. 

Even if there were no hereafter, it were worth 
the living well, and it were worth the filling of 
our lives with higher thoughts and nobler deeds, 



56 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

simply thus to serve as guides to human beings 
about us and following after. 

On the seas of materialism, agnosticism, and 
unbelief, there is not an object in sight to mark 
place or to give name. The wind-tossed waves, 
though they rise mountain high and portentous, 
soon sink back to the level of the sea and are 
known no more. So it is with every hope that 
rises betwixt the man of material or doubting mind 
and his horizon. In all the literature of human 
disbelief you could not point a finger to a place 
or locality, or to a place with a name. 

With the man of faith and hope and godly love, 
how different ! For him there is a place, as well 
as a condition — and a place too, with a beautiful 
name. The life of the Christ who was earth's 
greatest waymark and shining star, is an earnest 
of this heavenly place and of life therein. 

f 

XIII 

DRIFT IN NATURE 

|T is not an uncommon thing, from a 
steamer's deck, to see a log bobbing up 
and down upon the waves. Of more in- 
terest still, in one of those strange currents so 
common in ocean, is it to see a long procession of 




DRIFT IN NATURE 57 

logs, seaweed, and varied land debris — derelicts all 
of them, whether great or small — upon the ocean's 
highway. No human eye may follow the log's 
course, as our ship leaves it far behind. Perhaps 
it soon will be locked fast in an ice floe off Ice- 
land, or be rounding the Cape of Good Hope, or 
be caught in a simoon in the Indian Ocean ! Who 
knows } Some day a great storm will drive it 
ashore and a great wave will toss it high upon 
the beach. Too wet even to burn, the landsman 
will leave it for the sun to rot, or for the shifting 
winds to bury! 

On this same shore we have often watched the 
tides go out. Each incoming wave, falling short 
of the distance covered by its predecessor, has 
left behind a wave line of tiny flotsam — the par- 
allel lines of all of which looking so like flounces 
at the edge of a garment. And search where we 
may, we can scarcely find a more heterogeneous 
assortment than an analysis of this shore line of 
tiny seadrift would discover to us. Among this 
seadrift we could find much detritus, substances 
worn from solid bodies by attrition, and reduced 
to small particles. Now, we are in the habit of 
thinking that drift is without potentiality. And, 
alone, so it seems to be; but in the hands of an- 
other it can become one of the most destructive 
of agents. All of the rocky sea cliffs of the world, 



58 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

and the rocky wave-cut terraces, were carved out 
of rock, not by sea water per se, — for the erosive 
action of clear water-waves upon rock is practically 
nothing, — but by detritus in the grasp of the sea 
wave. The waves are ever ceaselessly at work 
with whatever drift they may find at hand. This 
drift not only carves out cliffs and terraces, but it 
builds bars and spits, and fills channels; all of 
which bring destruction and ruin to the mariner 
and his ship. 

On this same seacoast, it may be, if the pre- 
vailing winds are landward, and the land is arid, 
we shall find sand dunes. These dunes them- 
selves are as unstable as the drifting sands that 
compose them. 

Poor drifting seaside sands, tossed hither and 
thither by wind and wave, what a weary life of 
ceaseless travel is ever behind and before you! 
Your sides have been worn by attrition too smooth 
for soil ever to attach itself to, or else there might 
be hope that some day you would find yourself 
anchored, and so at last find rest. Down at the 
seaside these drifting sands are no respecters of 
persons. The most highly cultivated field, or 
aristocratic lawn, any morning after a high wind 
and tide, may wake to find itself covered deep 
with a sand so poor and common as to be useless 
even for melting into glass. 



DRIFT IN NATURE 59 

Almost as easily perturbed, and as restless and 
as shifting as the ocean, are all of the world's 
great interior deserts ; and here again we have 
wind and the same drifting sand. Woe to the 
traveler who expects to find in a desert, to be his 
guide, either path or footprint! Woe too, to the 
traveler who, in a desert wind-storm, has no kneel- 
ing, protecting camel behind which he may fall ! 
No tree ; no grass ; no shade ; naught but the 
ever-rolling, shifting, surging sands ! They cover 
the great Sphinx. They threaten to destroy the 
world's highway — the Suez Canal. They bury out 
of sight and remembrance ancient cities, where 
tens of thousands dwelt in magnificence of wealth 
and power. 

But in that desert somewhere, the traveler 
knows, are palm trees, and shade, and green grass, 
and a living spring of water ; and under his feet 
he will find, he knows, a firm, steadfast and fruit- 
ful soil. And how in the drifting sand desert his 
eyes strain and his heart aches for this oasis. 

The most infinite in numbers, the least homo- 
geneous, the most restless of all drift, is the dust 
in the air. Take even a quiet, closed room ; darken 
it, and then let in and across it a narrow band of 
sunlight : and behold the myriads of shifting, 
gleaming dust particles ! You will thus get some 
idea of the trials and tribulations of the average 



60 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

pair of lungs. Wherever there is drift, there is 
danger. Even the pure white snow, when blown 
into deep drifts, may suddenly engulf the unsus- 
pecting traveler. 

The world needs stable, fast-anchored souls in 
whom there is no wavering nor shadow of turning. 
God can trust such : and only on such rocks can 
he build. Such souls are the comfort and hope of 
the world. 

The really vicious in this world are numerically 
small. It is the idle in the hands of the vicious 
who are the despair of religion and patriotism. 
One shrewd, ambitious, scheming politician, with 
a rabble to do his work, has often overthrown 
governments. It was the same drift rabble who, 
shouting hosannas, followed Jesus on Palm Sun- 
day into Jerusalem, and a few days thereafter, at 
the instigation of priests, cried ^'Crucify him '' and 
followed him in derision to his cross. 

I know of no better way by which we may des- 
ignate this human drift than the term "detritus." 
In the one kingdom, detritus may be harmless 
enough, till caught in the clutches of the wave it 
is made to carve cliffs and terraces out of the 
solid rock. And in the higher kingdom, we find 
that human detritus, used as a tool and in the 
hands of another, can be made the same destruc- 



PATHS 6 1 

tive and powerful agent. In this human detritus 
lies the danger of the world. In a day it may 
rend a church. In a day it may pull down a 
throne. In a day it may defy the highest law of 
the land and bring a nation into disrepute. 

The hope of the Christian is in the changeless- 
ness of God. If there were in him the shadow of 
turning, the whole human race would be a derelict 
upon the sea of eternity. 

XIV 

PATHS 

|ATHS are the insignia and the index of 
civilization. The broader, the smoother, 
the more level, and the larger their 
number, the greater the civiHzation. Look on 
your map for its railroad lines and its post routes 
if you wish the easiest way to arrive at the stand- 
ing of a given section. Savages at best only have 
trails, while wild beasts prowl and roam by day 
and night over pathless and trackless wilds. 
^ A path by day is like a lighted lamp in the night. 
iiVnd so far as the traveler is concerned, even the 
fairest and most pleasant lands need paths as 
much as do dark forests, wild woods, marshy jun- 
gles, and vast stretches of uncultivated plain. 



62 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

And under what difficulties are some paths made. 
Yet there is not a mountain on earth on which by 
cutting out a zigzag track upon its face, or by hew- 
ing a continuous spiral line, you could not make a 
pathway even to the top. It is worth while to go 
to Switzerland, to drive up one of these zigzag 
mountain roads. One moment you are going east 
and with yawning precipices at your right ; the 
next moment you have turned and are going west 
and with a precipice on your left. And it is 
worth while going to Switzerland to ride over the 
wonderful Simplon Pass road or to go down into 
Italy to see some of the old Roman roads. And 
what more lasting monument than a well-built 
road ! These ancient Romans of two thousand 
years ago — themselves are gone, their cities are 
gone, but these roads, ever-enduring, still remain. 

Paths are made with a definite object. They 
all lead somewhere. No sane man builds a path 
to nowhere. And you can easily judge of the 
relative size and importance of that somewhere by 
the quality and condition of its paths. Take me 
even to a solitary farmhouse, and by skirting 
around it I can tell you what road leads to the 
market-place and town, and what road leads to the 
various outlying cultivated fields, and which one 
leads to the spring somewhere, perchance in the 
clump of trees in the hollow. 



PATHS 63 

As with streams that in Florida or in the West 
flow onward for a while and then suddenly disap- 
pear into earth, so there is ever a mystery about a 
path that turns and whose end cannot be seen. I 
have followed curve by curve a crooked railroad half 
a day to find what might be be3^ond the next turn. 
There is a fascination about a road that climbs a 
hill and then suddenly drops and hides itself from 
sight, and I have scaled a hundred hills to find 
where on the other side these roads lead. No 
forester who builds roads through wooded parks, no 
gardener who lays out walks through his flowers, 
evergreens, and shrubbery, but who marks out 
many turns and curves which, while serving ever 
to hide that which is before, thus brings each 
moment new surprises to him who follows the 
path. 

The first rule taught the child learning to drive 
is to keep in the middle of the road, for there is 
danger on the road's outermost limits, and beyond 
these limits are rocks and stumps and gullies and 
brambles and bushes. But even a path broad, 
smooth, and clear ahead must to some have always 
in it much perplexity. You cannot make the way, 
try as much as you may, too plain and too certain 
and with too many sign posts, in which the world 
is to tread. For all the world is going continually 
somewhere, and for it daily there are countless 



64 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

destination points. We would almost give our 
very lives, would we not, to have given us the 
power to make all these paths clear, even, and 
easy ! 

God's men and God's women are those who are 
daily making paths — smooth and easy paths — for 
all people. This is the world's siimmtcm bonum. 
For no more than commerce, can the world go 
without paths. It may be only a song in the dark, 
a simple light in a window, a kindly nod, the grasp 
of a hand, the loan or the gift of a dollar or a hun- 
dred or a thousand. It is not every one who has 
the ability and skill of a Napoleon, who built Sim- 
plon Pass, yet every one may open a path. 

It is the surveyor with his chain and compass 
and theodolite ; it is the man with the steam 
ploughs and shovels, the man with the broken rock 
or chert and cement or asphalt or vitrified brick — 
these are the true types of Christianity. 

Like the ships that sail the seas, or like the 
stars that follow paths through the skies, so in 
comprehensive thought each individual life and all 
human life that is journeying onward is traveling 
on a highway and is going somewhere. There is 
a way that is called the '' King*s Highway *' that 
is better than all other ways. The king himself 
opened up this way and with proclamation has 



PATHS 65 

said, "This is the way, walk ye in it/' To obey 
his commands and his rules (and search the world 
over you will find none comparable with his) is to 
follow on in his highway. But how the world is 
surging from right to left ; how men are trampling 
over boundaries and into briars and brambles, and 
how near they come to fearful precipices. 

The King's Highway has on it many stations, 
but it is not every one who finds them. Most of 
us make this highway, alas, quite a long way, and 
too many of us make it an uphill way. For no 
matter how superior your track and equipment, 
are there not always some not quite happy trav- 
elers ? 

And the end of the way is not in sight and 
there is mystery beyond. And for that very mys- 
tery's sake, and for the newness that we know 
that we shall find beyond, you and I all the harder 
will press on. 

I have sometimes thought of the significance of 
the term, the heavenly city. It is a city, not 
only because of the multitude there, but because 
of the infinite number of its streets. The monot- 
ony of the plains or of the waveless sea is no part 
or portion of the city. And so in this heavenly 
city there must be a myriad of ways or paths, 
each one leading to a destination point that has 
its own delight and joy. 




66 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 



XV 



OASES THE '' ISLANDS OF THE BLESSED " 

BORDS are never made till needed. You 
and I, untraveled, and living in this semi- 
tropical splendor of vegetation, would 
never have coined the word oasis. Yet to the 
frequenter of the desert no word in all the world 
is sweeter. For no other vegetation is so green, 
no other springs of water are so pure and sweet 
as those found here. 

The most fearful conditions existing on earth 
other than being absolutely overwhelmed by fire 
or water one finds in the world's great tropical 
deserts. Here are found no highways, for every 
track of camel or man is soon smoothed over by 
the restless moving sands. And the bleached 
white bones of camel or of man, that represent the 
lives that have been sacrificed to the desert, may 
simply mark a lost way and a way contrary to the 
line of our intended travel. All day long a cloud- 
less sun beats down upon the traveler's head, the 
hot sands under his feet hold heat enough to cook 
articles of food, and fierce winds of torrid air are 
strong enough to cover a whole caravan with biting 
particles that may as well be hot ashes from a live 
furnace. 



OASES THE ''ISLANDS OF THE BLEbSED " 6/ 

Turn his eyes whatever way he may, they will 
be met on every side by only the most wretched 
landscape, a landscape in which there is no water, 
no rock, no tree, nor shrub, nor green grass. Here 
in this wilderness of death there is no sweet voice 
of nature, for when the sands are asleep there is 
stillness so awful that, as in deepest caverns, one 
hears his own heart throb and beat. One would 
as soon think of visiting charnel houses, or of 
walking, like Abednego, through fiery furnaces, 
as to go across a desert for pleasure. 

The great desert of Sahara is the grand type of 
all the world's deserts. As it stretches almost 
from ocean to ocean and across the great continent 
of Africa (on the maps even designated by pock 
marks), it is but an almost boundless area of vast 
sandy plain — dreary, solitary, and arid. 

Yet in this desert there are no less than six 
great oases, where human habitation in commu- 
nities is found. And there are no less than six 
thousand smaller oases, where are found living 
fountains and date trees and palm trees and the 
verdure of shrub and grass. These oases are usu- 
ally deep depressions in valleys, where water comes 
to the surface, thus making fertile tracts where 
there was but aridness, and thus converting sand 
heaps into mounds of living green. 

No wonder the well-ni^h water-famished and 



68 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

heat-stricken caravan takes on desperate and almost 
incredible speed when in the desert there looms 
up in plain sight an oasis fair and beautiful. No 
wonder their hearts beat fast too as they behold 
even the mocking phantom of a shadowy mirage. 

Think of refreshment, shelter, and rest — date 
trees, palm trees, and living wells of water — out 
in the midst of a desert. But what an environ- 
ment to be born in and to live in must be a desert. 
How, as the long, monotonous days come and go, 
oft and anon those great volumes of parched sands 
must surge and beat like hungry waves against 
our living oasis. Sometimes, alas, the smaller and 
weaker ones in reality are engulfed and swallowed 
up, though perhaps with shifting sands removed, 
to reappear again some day. 

The deserts of the world will be reclaimed. 
Every low-lying oasis tapping a water-line is an 
earnest by nature of what man scientifically is ex- 
pected to do some day on a gigantic scale. There 
is abundant water for all of earth if we know how 
to go for it. Not an oasis, no matter how small, 
in all this world, but is doing its own blessedest 
best when in finding this water it sends forth 
flower and fruit and leaf and blade. Not an oasis, 
no matter how small, in all this world, but in all 
truth seems to some weary, famished desert trav- 
eler to be one of the many islands of the blessed. 



OASES THE ''ISLANDS OF THE BLESSED" 69 

There is water enough for all the world. The 
little oasis knows where and how to find it, and 
having found it, becomes a place of refreshment 
and life itself for all desert life. Now we know 
just such men and women. And life to us is 
worth the living — yes, a thousand livings — if out 
of the hard conditions in which so many of our 
fellow-mortals live they look to us as the worn 
and weary caravan looks upon the oasis of the 
desert. 

God never painted a more beautiful picture on 
earth's surface than the oasis. Nor is his handi- 
work more gloriously revealed in this human king- 
dom than in the men and women who inspire in 
us hope and who give succor and help and refresh- 
ment. 

How the desert sands surge against some people. 
How hard it is for them to keep the wells of water 
pure and uncontaminated and how hard to prevent 
themselves from being overwhelmed. For when 
an oasis is obliterated and lost, what shall become 
then of the traveler in the desert.** 

God never intended desert conditions to exist 
always. And this is your and my work. There 
is water enough for all the world. In our coun- 
try's Western deserts artesian wells are being sunk 
and whole forests of trees are being set out. 

The man who constitutes himself into an oasis 



70 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

— date trees, palm trees, springs of water, shrub- 
bery, green grass, and all — is by that much nar- 
rowing the area of Sahara, and is changing charac- 
ters on the map from that of a pock mark to that 
of a spreading, growing plant or tree. 

God does not ask more nor does he ask less 
than that you do your blessed best. That done, 
so long as you and the desert survive will pilgrims 
on earth and angels in heaven name you as being 
one of the islands of the blessed. 



XVI 

LABORATORY METHODS 

|HE analytical chemist stands apart from 
the great majority of the world's work- 
ers whose tools are crude, heavy, cum- 
bersome, and inefficient, and whose materials, un- 
fortunately, are usually of the kind called '* com- 
mercial,'' and whose product is intended for the 
general and not over-critical public. The require- 
ments of the chemist are far more severe in tool 
and material ; for his work must be exact, com- 
plete, full, and true. A half-truth from him could 
never be tolerated. His work, moreover, is far 
more general and comprehensive than that of 
others ; and to this end he must have the most 




LABORATORY METHODS 7 1 

perfect instruments for crushing, pulverizing, 
weighing, digestion, precipitation, filtration, wash- 
ing, drying, etc. He must have scores too, of re- 
agents or tests, every one of which must be chem- 
ically pure. Not a drop of water, for example, 
can he use except it be distilled. 

The world demands of the chemist absolute 
truth — nothing less. She sets him to work out an 
infinite number of problems, all of which he must 
do with mathematical precision and finish and with 
a nicety unknown in the realm of other workers. 
To fail in any of these in the slightest, means the 
rejection of him and his work. A chemical analy- 
sis, in other words, means that our worker must 
first find every individual ingredient or element in 
our unknown compound, and then determine the 
quantity by weight of each. If he falls short in 
the finding of one element, or wrongly determines 
a weight, his analysis is worthless, and as such it 
might do a world of harm. There is, indeed, only 
one word that could be fittingly inscribed over the 
doorway of all chemical laboratories and that word 
is ^* Truth.'' 

Chemical analysis is, the world over, a process 
of discovery. The chemist begins in darkness 
and then turns on the light to see what haply he 
may find. If he knew beforehand, or if he in- 
tended to coerce the truth, if he is biased, or if his 



72 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

mind is already made up, what is the use of his 
scales and mortars and flasks and beakers and 
crucibles and blow pipes and acids and alkalis ? 

And because each chemical problem for analysis 
is undertaken in the dark and with solution every 
whit unknown, then each analysis must have 
neither heredity nor environment ; it must stand 
alone and disassociated from all else on earth. No 
chemist ever approached his work with other 
thought than this. The chemist is like one, in 
truth, who goes into a door and closing it shuts 
every jot and tittle of the world outside. 

In chemistry the worker takes things as he finds 
them and not as he wants them to be. He might 
prefer that the rock he is assaying shall be gold 
bearing, or that the water for analysis shall be 
lithia, but what is that to truth ? In the realms of 
chemistry it is experience, which is the finding out 
by trial, and not hope, which discovers truth. 

The process of analysis is confining, slow, and 
exacting. The not uncommon fee of five hundred 
or one thousand dollars on the part of the chemist, 
affords us some idea of the tedium and skill re- 
quired in order that absolute truth may be ob- 
tained. Largely the process consists at first of 
repeated tests. In this process there are no short- 
cuts, however desirable this might be to the worker 
in his wearisome toil through the days and weeks. 



LABORATORY METHODS y^ 

The world is full of the compound, the com- 
plex, and the unknown. The chemist with all of 
his patience and skill, fails ofttimes to break up the 
complex into its simple constituents. And not in- 
frequently in the final report of his analysis w^e 
find the fateful word '' undetermined.'' 

I once heard a man say that from a religious 
standpoint he would exchange places with no 
other living man ; for, said he, I do not know 
what any other man believes, but I do know that 
I humbly yet sincerely have faith in God. This 
sure confidence was the result not of hope, but of 
experience — the finding out by trial — and of test. 
The religious problems that confront every man 
are the most momentous things of his life. These 
problems are full of the complex, compound, and 
the unknown, and the saintliest of us all must die 
and leave behind at the last, many, so far as earth 
is concerned, undetermined. But all the way the 
Christian life here and beyond is a process of dis- 
covery, and his work always is to discover truth. 

But what one of us, pray, in this search in the 
moral realm, is brave enough and wise enough and 
with sufificient thought of personal responsibility, 
to engage in this work, free from bias, prejudice, 
environment, and heredity.^ And how few of us, 
alas, dare use the laboratory methods of scales and 



74 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

crucibles and mortars and pestles and retorts and 
acids and alkali tests ! Who of us in the perplex- 
ing and complicated moral questions that daily 
confront us, goes within, and there alone without 
question, shuts the door and so leaves every jot 
and tittle of the world outside and searches simply 
for truth ? 



XVII 

THE MEDIA THROUGH WHICH WE SEE 

|EVERAL years ago it was thought there 
had been discovered a new gas, one thou- 
sand times less dense than hydrogen gas ; 
it was called '^ etherion" by its discoverer, because 
he believed, and so argued, that it is this gas that 
fills all inter-star space. 

At the top of Mont Blanc in mid-day, with so 
much of the baser and more obscuring portion of 
the atmosphere below and under your feet, an ob- 
server looking up into a dark blue velvet field, sees 
clearly the faces of shining stars. Imagine your- 
self standing on the moon, with no atmosphere 
about it : nothing but this hypothetical '^ ethe- 
rion.'* How ineffably pure the outlook would be ! 
How absolutely clear and pure and straight would 
be every ray of light that came to you from every 




THE MEDIA THROUGH WHICH WE SEE 75 

one of the millions and millions of scintillating 
stars ! About you and over you would lie no pall 
of dust and ashes and soot, such as envelops the 
earth. About you there would be no over-hang- 
ing earth steam, or vapor, or fog ; no lofty cirri or 
ice clouds; and no lovv^-lying dark rain clouds. 
There in that lofty, clear, and pure empyrean, how 
every luminary in the heavens would glow and 
shine as no mortal on earth has ever seen them ! 

Follow a sun ray as it sifts down through our 
atmosphere. Here it goes through one stratum of 
mist, and there another ; here it gets certain color 
as it passes through one dust stratum, and there 
another color; here it is reflected from one 
smooth-surfaced particle, and there it is deflected 
by another. A falling leaf that flutters to the 
ground is not less varying in its earthward 
course as it falls than is a sun ray. And the sun 
ray falling to earth is tinged at varying times with 
the colors and hues of all the media through which 
it passes, and on account of these changing, shift- 
ing media, the sun and the sky never look twice 
just the same. 

The moon that rose the other evening at eight, 
as we looked at it along the earth's plane, was big 
and swollen and red. The busy day had filled the 
atmosphere with earth-red dust and other particles. 
The hot moist earth was constantly sending up- 



NATURE IX THE WITNESS-BOX 



ward tremulous heat waves. We saw the moon 
through a thick and clouded atmosphere. As it 
rose higher and higher in the still and quiet night 
the dust and all air impurities settled down upon 
the earth's surface, and it, showing a seeming 
smaller globe, shone ever more and more with 
silvery whiteness. And in the morning when the 
air was still more pure than at midnight, our sil- 
very moon changed into cold steel. But all the 
while it w^as the same moon at which we were 
looking. The moon never changed one whit. 
And how often does the sun set in the evening 
wdth the same big red face that we saw in the 
moon, and for the same reason ? And yet it is the 
same sun, though with redder face than we saw at 
midday. 

Bring a fish accustomed to a water medium out 
upon shore. The sunlight streaming through air 
media blinds and stuns him. Perhaps if you and 
I should scale to heights above five hundred miles 
and could look through an etherion medium into 
the unobscured and blazing lights of heaven, we 
too would be blinded and we would fall down and 
cover our faces from the light, as did Israel, when 
they beheld the shining face of Moses after he had 
come from the mount. 

How bedraggled and soggy and orphaned does 
the world look through an atmosphere of rain ! 



THE MEDIA THROUGH WHICH WE SEE ^J 

How pure the world looks through an atmosphere 
of snow ! How fresh the world looks through the 
atmosphere of a spring morning ! How a winter 
evening, with the sun gone down and when the 
sky is gray and lowering, and when the limbs 
creak on the trees, and the earth, frozen hard, rings 
like steel under our feet, how, in looking through 
an atmosphere of this kind, do we, cold and shiver- 
ing, hasten homeward to the warm fireside that 
awaits us ; and how seated there in light and 
warmth and amid sweet companionship, our very 
heart and mind seem to thaw out along with our 
fingers, ears, and toes, and how, forgetting the icy 
world outside, the world within us, looking through 
another medium, takes on a summer's warmth and 
hue ! 

I have stood in God's acre, while the sun shone 
brightly and while the birds sang merrily, when 
the clods were fast hiding away my heart's love, 
and the very sun seemed forbidding and cold and 
all the birds made but jarring discords. 

Each of us largely makes his own atmosphere : 
and the world sees us through, and judges us by 
that atmosphere. Do not blame the world there- 
fore, if it believes you cold, selfish, uncompan- 
ionable, and unfeeling. And through this atmos- 
phere, builded by us around ourselves, we see 



78 NATURE IN THE WTINESS-BOX 

Other people, and other people seen through our 
medium seem just like ourselves. We are con- 
stantly crediting to other people (and innocent 
people) those vices that are the most rampant in 
our own hearts. We absolutely see God himself 
through our own atmosphere and we transform 
him into a being as unlovable as ourselves. 

And what queer ideas some of us have about 
heaven as seen through the medium of our own 
atmosphere ? To some it is simply a place of di- 
vans and cushions, of golden pave and pearly 
gates, and of angelic music. To some it is a place 
simply of eternal rest. To some it is simply a 
place where everything will be handed around on 
golden trenchers and where there will be nothing 
for us to gain and attain through our own struggle 
and endeavor. To some it is simply a place vv^ith- 
out sin and sorrow, and where the soul will have 
no more enemies. To some it is a place of abso- 
lute equality and where every man is made as good 
as every other man and where there is no man 
better than any other. To some, heaven, in sea- 
faring phrase, seems the universal harbor where 
all the individual crafts shall some day ride for- 
ever safely anchored. How strange will it be to 
such to find heaven to be the open infinite sea and 
the scene of infinite endeavor ! 

We do not get these visions out of the Bible. 



FROST 



79 




Every one of them is individual. They are our 
own atmospheres. If you and I could cast off our 
own atmosphere and surround our minds and 
hearts and souls with spiritual *'etherion," how 
different would men and God and heaven seem] 



XVIII 

FROST 

[HERE is, I believe, no agency in all na- 
ture more fearfully destructive and more 
widely feared than frost. 
All through the early autumn and the late 
spring months this universal monster is dreaded 
by green and growing plant life. On some still 
night, when the world is asleep and in the dark, 
and oftentimes with smallest warning, he steals 
upon some given area and with a million silent 
mowing machines lays low all tender vegetation, 
whether it be bud, flower, leaf, or indeed the 
whole plant. The morning sun never looked 
upon a deadlier battlefield with condition more 
direful than does this same sun every morn- 
ing in the early fall and in the middle or later 
spring in some parts of the earth. In the higher 
altitudes or latitudes these dreaded nights come 
sooner, but in all latitudes they come at sometime. 



80 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

save in the frostless lands that he for the most 
part down in the tropics. Clouds, fogs, rains, 
snows, dew, and frost all depend upon the con- 
densation of the aqueous vapor in this envelope 
of air that is piled up some forty miles deep 
around this earth of ours. Yonder moon would 
be infinitely cold, but it could never have a cloud 
or rain or snow or ice or a frost, if it were with- 
out an atmosphere. 

It shows the spirit in this monster when I say 
that it is in the clear, calm, cloudless nights that 
frost is most operative and distinctive. A given 
area, indeed, is fairly safe from frost when clouds 
and fogs — these are earth's warm blankets — pre- 
vail. 

The wind too is frost's enemy, for the wind 
keeps the air strata disturbed and prevents them 
at night from arranging themselves according to 
gravity, viz, the heaviest, which is always the cold- 
est, at the bottom. The warmer ah* which during 
the day collects near the earth at night rises to 
higher altitudes, while the cooler upper air having 
greater density and weight settles upon the earth. 

By reason of this fact that the higher air alti- 
tudes at night are filled with the day's warm air 
strata that come from below, the orchardist and 
trucker long ago learned to plant all early and 
tender crops on hilltops and hill or mountain 



FROST 8 1 

sides, while the hardier and all late crops were 
planted in the low lands. The sun through all 
the day is storing up heat in the earth and into 
plants. But the sun gone down, these objects 
radiate their heat fast into the air and soon become 
colder than the outlying air. The better radiator 
an object is the quicker will the frost settle upon 
it. Damp ground is a better radiator than dry 
ground, and low damp lands in the valleys is frost's 
favorite habitat. 

It frequently happens by means of radiation 
that low-lying plants will be killed by frost when 
air ten feet above will show a thermometer above 
thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, or above freezing. 
A signal office's report of the lowest temperature 
of the night before would give that temperature 
at the level or height in the air about his instru- 
ment. But the plants on the ground below would 
show a temperature of several degrees below this 
— a fall sufficient perhaps to freeze the plants stiff 
in the frost. 

Snow may act as a blanket and prevent the 
earth from radiating her heat. Vegetation may 
be kept green under the snow. But frost freezes 
the sap in the ducts of a plant and they burst like 
the water pipes in your house in January. 

One does not have to go to Florida, where he 
may see a whole State's chief industry paralyzed 



82 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

perhaps beyond recovery, in order to discover the 
spirit and work of frost. For there is not a soul 
in the land that owns a plant, and that loves it, 
but at the proper season is on the lookout for and 
is guarding against this, the plant's greatest enemy. 

If one's plants are few he can cover them with 
inverted pots, or paper or boards, and so prevent 
the earth and the plants from radiating their heat. 
In a hot-house a lighted lamp may keep the tem- 
perature above freezing. In large areas station- 
ary or portable smudge fires, giving out a great 
amount of smoke that settles down as a cloud or 
a blanket upon the landscape are largely used, and 
especially in orchards. The partial flooding with 
water of a certain area will keep temperatures up 
and thereby prevent the falling of frost. 

That there are in non-tropical regions certain 
warm or thermal belts, and that some of these are 
frostless belts, is well known to science. In the 
mountains of North Carolina there are several 
such regions. The theory is that the cold air 
settles to the bottom, while the warm air rises 
from two to seven hundred feet and spreads out 
upon the hillsides and furnishes heat to them be- 
fore it cools and so descends. This circulation of 
air during the night is the salvation of the belt. 

Thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit at earth's level 



FOGS 83 

means frost in all the kingdoms. A smiling face 
above may not signify necessarily that upon the 
heart, fifteen inches below, there does not rest a 
stratum so cold that it sinks that organ to the 
frost point. Periodical heart frosts do far more 
harm than was ever done by the worst of Florida 
frosts. It is easy enough to keep the frost out 
on sunshiny days with the sun and warm air to 
help us. It is when the sun goes down, — this is 
the time of danger. 

It is possible to keep ourselves on high levels 
and so to surround ourselves with conditions that 
make for warmth. It is possible for us to keep 
this heart of ours in a vernal, thermal, or frostless 
belt ; and God demands no less than this of us. 
God demands that we shall keep the flowers that 
he gives us, so that every blossom shall, despite 
frosts, mature safely into fruit for his gathering. 

XIX 

FOGS 

jNE morning in Zurich, Switzerland, a party 
of us telephoned to the top of the Rigi 
to know what manner of day to-morrow 
would be. 

The answer came back : '' It is foggy to-day, but 




84 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

will be clear to-morrow." Now a sunrise view 
from this mountain is worth going half-way around 
the world to see ; but no matter how far above 
earth and lofty that eminence, what matters it if 
there be a fog ? All the suns of the universe 
might rise, but they could not gild one of the 
hundred snowcaps glistening white about us, nor 
would they discover evidence of Germany's won- 
derful Black Forest, nor show any trace of valley 
or lake or plain far beneath. One, indeed, might 
sit on the throne of the universe with enchant- 
ment spread out above and beneath and around 
him — but suppose there were a fog ? 

Now a fog is no respecter of persons or places. 
It may hug the ground and settle down pall-like 
and cold and clammy, over the meanest swamp or 
the loneliest moor, or it may fill the Strand in 
London ! Its presence means bewilderment and 
making uncertain the way of the most timid wild 
animals, as well as that of the lordliest man. I 
have seen a fog cut a mountain just in half, or 
possibly nip off its extreme and pinnacle end, and 
so hide it from sight ; and I have seen one that 
had climbed far out of the dust and grime and 
soot of earth, and had ascended ten miles into 
eternal purity — yet a fog still ! 

But it makes great difference to us whether the 
fog is above us and in mid-heaven, or all about 



FOGS 85 

and around us. Nature has been kind ; if she had 
made the fogs to be earth's constant carpet in 
place of hanging them as curtains and draperies 
in her lofty chambers, then we should stop travel- 
ing, for no light yet discovered will appreciably 
penetrate fog. 

Fog is heavier than air, and if it were not for 
the matter of temperature, and for the fact that 
air currents from earth are constantly rising, — fac- 
tors that keep the fogs mostly above earth and in 
mid-air, — why earth, a large part of the time, would 
be wrapped in a fleecy, vaporous blanket. You 
have doubtless often watched these aerial fogs, 
now slowly, softly floating, now tearing across the 
heavens like an express train, now black like ink 
(perhaps boiling furiously), and now showing all 
the gray and lighter shades, even to whitest fleeci- 
ness ; now evaporating and dissolving, and now 
standing still and sullen and glowering like some 
chained mighty monster. 

Before there can be a fog or rain, warm, moist 
air must first be chilled. Chilliness and conse- 
quent fog come from expansion of air through its 
ascension into higher and colder strata of air ; or it 
follows whenever and wherever a warm, moist cur- 
rent of air meets a cold current. The warm wet 
air of the sea meets, for example, the cold air of 
the land, and thus the coast line is everywliere the 



86 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

line of great condensation and of much fog and 
rain. The varied warm and cold currents of water 
in the ocean is the primal cause of sea fogs. These 
sea fogs often lie so low on the waters that a ship's 
topmast stands out above them ; their confines are 
so narrow that a ship often runs through one as 
quickly as a train runs through a shower. Some- 
times they will lift for a moment or two and then 
impenetrably blindfold you again. 

Fog has no power in itself. It is a white-sheeted 
ghost that now ascends, now descends, and now 
moves and stalks, or motionless stands, or now 
dissolves into thin air. Fog itself cannot hurt us. 
But it can shut in and narrow our horizon, it can 
make uncertain our course, and it can hide lurking 
dangers. I recall an evening in mid-ocean. All 
day, with the dreary whistle keeping tab of the 
time, we had been ploughing our way through fog, 
never being able to see a ship's length ahead, 
when suddenly and without warning we met and 
ran by a three-masted ship, that in passing almost 
scraped our sides ! 

Doubt is a fog, and like a fog it may float high 
and ethereal and intangible in our mental and 
moral atmosphere, or lying low it may blur and 
stop our onward course, or it may shut us out at 
last from harbor. Doubts are mostly sheeted and 



FOGS 87 

ghostly, with shape, yet void — things that now 
come and go, now dissolving and now reappearing. 

The doubting man is the man with the chilled 
atmosphere about him. If he had, perchance, a 
warm impulse proceeding from within him, it 
would be met on the outside and converted at 
once into fog. To the man with the chilled at- 
mosphere everything appears as a mist and fog 
and doubt. He doubts the God who made him, 
the Christ who saves him, the heaven prepared for 
him, and the brother by his side. Whether stand- 
ing on the Rigi or in the valley, this man is sur- 
rounded by fog. Put him on ocean's highway, or 
on the Strand, and he becomes at once a positive 
danger to navigation. 

The average man, if the clouds are quite high 
in the sky, scarcely is aware half the time that the 
sun is not shining. Then what a pity you and I 
cannot send our doubts high up where they can- 
not hurt ! If we must doubt, then let us send 
this fog ten miles up in the sky, and out of harm's 
way, and make draperies and snow banks and odd 
faces and shapes out of it, to our heart's content. 
No ship ever anchors, and no ship ever dashes 
headlong into another, at sea, simply because it 
happens to be sailing under a lofty Cirrus ! 

God is the world's sunlight ; but even the sun- 
light, striving as it may, cannot pierce fog ! 




88 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

XX 

THE PROPERTIES OF MATTER 

|N the highest sense, this is a utilitarian 
world. All things are for use, and each 
thing is for an individual use. That use 
is dependent upon the individual inherent qualities 
or properties that may be possessed by any given 
subject-matter. And no one thing can fill out its 
destiny and serve its purpose of being until the 
world has found out, through these inherent prop- 
erties, for what good it is. 

These properties are the physical romances of 
the nature world. The marvel of gold is its malle- 
able and ductile properties. One ounce of gold 
can be beaten so as to cover one hundred and 
sixty square feet, and one grain of it can be drawn 
into a wire five hundred and sixty feet in length. 
The wonder of silver is that it is the whitest of all 
the metals, and that it has no equal as a conduc- 
tor of heat. Bismuth is the most diamagnetic ele- 
ment known — a sphere of it actually being repelled 
by a magnet. Iridium is practically untarnishable 
and is well-nigh infusible. Aluminum, white in 
color and non-corrosive, is also the lightest of all 
useful metals. Antimony has properties that 
make it a necessity in all anti-friction metal alloys. 



THE PROPERTIES OF MATTER 89 

The metal magnesium differs from all others in 
that it, in the form of a thin ribbon, burns with 
dazzhng brilliancy, and is useful for signal lights 
and flash lights. Platinum is a necessity in the 
making of vessels that are needed to vv^ith stand 
fire and acids; it is therefore indispensable in the 
chemical laboratory. Mercury has strange proper- 
ties that cause it to melt at temperatures above 
thirty-nine degrees Fahrenheit, and it has proper- 
ties too that forbid its ever being touched by any 
other metal than platinum and iron. 

These are a few salient properties of a few of 
the metals. These are qualities in truth that dif- 
ferentiate all the different metals. These are all 
invested and inherent qualities. In the case of 
each metal above, these are the characteristics 
that are present, and are the essential attributes 
of the metal in question. Your counterfeits might 
be as yellow as gold, or as bright as silver, but if 
they do not possess all of the properties of these 
two metals they would by no means be gold or 
silver. Of all various matter in nature, each type 
possesses therefore individual properties that can 
never be absent from it. Each type has its own 
life purpose, its own sphere of usefulness, and its 
own inter-relationships with all other matter. 

We must not suppose from this that matter is 
unalterable and unchano:eable. If we heat soft iron 



90 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

filings to a red hot heat, they lose all of their mag- 
netic qualities. If we heat mercury to nearly six 
hundred and eighty degrees, it becomes at once 
the useful red oxide of mercury. By well-known 
processes we can convert iron into steel. 

These latter states, however, are in reality new 
states, and with their own properties. Of each 
type there may be of course subdivisions. There 
are, for example, many kinds of iron — each useful 
in its own way, and for some peculiar specific use 
according as are its properties. 

The price of an article is somewhat dependent 
upon the fact as to how abundantly it is found in 
nature ; but worthiness and true inherent value 
depend solely upon properties. Gold, no matter 
how abundant it might become, would always be 
of great value, because it is the most malleable of 
all metals. Platinum will always possess great 
value, because it stands at the head of the list 
among all metals in point of ductility and fusibil- 
ity; and iron too will always be of great value, 
regardless of the quantity of it that is mined, 
because no other known metal possesses so great 
tenacity. 

Each human being in the world is a unit and 
differentiated from every other because of certain 
invested inherent qualities or attributes within 



THE PROPERTIES OF MATTER 9 1 

him — qualities inherited or gained by individual 
effort. Every human being is worthy or un- 
worthy, he is of value to the world or he is of no 
value, according as these qualities are possessed 
by him. These worthy attributes may be either 
mental, or moral, or both. 

If the various properties of matter in the phys- 
ical world — adaptations to certain ends — seem mar- 
vels for us to wonder at, then how much more 
beautiful and adaptive must seem those proper- 
ties as possessed by the human being into whose 
keeping have been given economies of the world ! 
The true-heartedness of gold, the lustre of silver, 
the untarnishableness of iridium, the anti-friction 
qualities of antimony, the dazzling brilliancy of 
magnesium, the qualities as found in platinum that 
cause it to withstand fire and acids — we find in 
truth all of these properties among human beings. 
And there is many a human life so transcendent 
in some property or quality that it seems a story 
from a romance! 

In all the kingdoms, the nobler the qualities, 
the higher and more useful the life and the larger 
the sphere of work. One wonders, and with a 
great yearning, to know just what wondrous prop- 
erties are inherent in angels and archangels ! 

It is only in commercial life that the rarity of an 
object helps to fix its market price ; for although 



92 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

there may be myriads of angels and redeemed in 
heaven, yet the fact of this great number, I am 
sure, does not lessen the beauty and loveliness of 
the least one of them. Gold in the higher king- 
dom is of value not because it is rare, but because 
it is gold ! 



XXI 

STRESS AND STRAIN 

j|HEREVER a blow or pressure is exerted 
from without or against an object, there 
is a corresponding power or force within 
the object that resists the attack. The amount of 
this resisting power is the measure of the object's 
strength, and if objects did not have this resisting 
power, then there would soon be an end to all 
organic matter. It is unfortunate that the science 
of mechanics has no distinct name for these two 
opposing forces. It seems strange, indeed, and 
yet as a matter of fact it is true, that of the two 
names stress and strain, each one by different 
writers has been used to designate three separate 
and distinct things. In other words, the external 
force and the internal resisting force and also the 
harmful result of the two forces have each in turn 
been called by some stress, and by others strain. 




STRESS AND STRAIN 93 

The only difference between the infinite num- 
ber of varied tortures that can be inflicted upon 
the human being, and the stress and strain that 
can be inflicted upon all matter, is that while the 
former is sensible of pain, the latter is not. A 
stick of wood, a bar of iron, a block of stone can 
give as strong evidence of a strain as can a person. 

Matter is vulnerable from every side. Tensile 
force can elongate it, compressive force can shorten 
it ; transverse force can bend it, tortional force can 
twist it ; while shearing force can cause one part 
to slide over an adjacent part. And in these five 
ways, and from tens of thousands of varied forces, 
all matter is undergoing constant and ever-recur- 
ring stress and strain. And theoretically and 
truthfully every stress, no matter where directed, 
and in the human being or natural world — every 
strain, no matter how small, leaves its mark. The 
microscope could assuredly discover and show it. 
Now if this resultant were too marked, then all 
matter would be short-lived. But in nature's 
economy we can bend many things and yet not 
break them. 

There can be no stress or strain of matter that 
does not to a certain extent weaken cohesion and 
does not cause displacement of molecules or par- 
ticles. If each of these molecules could always 
fly back in perfect elasticity to its aforetime place, 



94 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

then matter, so far as outward forces are con- 
cerned, would be immortal. But all matter that is 
subjected to stress or strain has a more or less 
limited life. And so variable and so cumulative 
is the wear and tear, which is the effect of stress 
and strain, that no civil engineer or architect ever 
dares to trust matter to its theoretical life-limit 
and to its supposed extreme power or strength. 

Matter possesses this strange quality; it can 
withstand far more external pressure when that 
pressure is exerted slowly and little by little and 
continuously, than when it is directed all at once. 
But the strangest quality of matter is its cumula- 
tive effect. Matter that can withstand sixty thou- 
sand pound pressure would after a time be de- 
stroyed under one-third or twenty thousand pounds 
pressure, if that pressure is exerted at different 
and stated times that are sufficiently close together 
and that are continued long enough. A continual 
succession of blows will break anything. Trip 
hammers, iron axles, piston rods, steel rails of rail- 
roads — all have a limited life and a life that is cut 
short, not from any one prodigious blow, but 
through a long succession or series of repeated 
shocks, through minor blows. Wrought iron un- 
der continuous vibration, which is indeed a series 
of small blows, will assume crystalline structure, 
and will show largely deteriorated cohesive powers. 



STRESS AND STRAIN 95 

As powerful a force and as all sufficient for a 
time as is elasticity, yet even elasticity grows 
weak and fails under constantly repeated stress 
and strain, no matter how minor the blows may 
be. 

There is a vital point in mechanics known as the 
elastic limit, or yield-point. Up to this point mat- 
ter, if it is relieved of strain, would recover its 
former status ; but beyond this point there could 
not be a total recovery, and there would result 
either what is known as a permanent **set," or a 
breakage and a total falling away. 

In this human world we do not take heed as 
we should to these laws of stress and strain. If 
we did there would be fewer broken hearts and 
fewer broken bodies and constitutions. While 
God has given to the human being also this blessed 
gift of elasticity, yet it is a fact that, under re- 
peated and oft-returned stress and strain, the 
human being too at last loses the power of re- 
turning to a former place and status. 

Woe to the man who adds to the stress and 
strain of the world ! The tiniest burden that you 
lay and lay daily upon yonder heart will bring it, 
far sooner than you think, to that ''yield point'* 
from which there is no earthly recovery. And if 
it is a larger burden that you bring, then (though 



96 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

there may be a corresponding resisting force in 
every being) if under continued stress and strain 
trip hammers fly to pieces, and if seventy pound 
steel rails break, and if wrought iron bars under 
continuous vibration assume crystalline structure 
and become greatly weakened — then what chance 
has your human victim, who is far weaker than 
any of these ? 

As against this I am sure that all that heaven 
knows of tensile, compressive, transverse, tortional, 
and shearing stress and strain is from information 
afforded by earth. For the burden of earth's stress 
and strain comes up to heaven — to Christ and 
God, and guardian angel, and perhaps to redeemed ! 
How heinous must be an offense whose burden 
rests upon two worlds ! And in that clearer at- 
mosphere of heaven, how magnified must look even 
the microscopical stresses and strains of earth ! 



XXII 

FRICTION 

|HE voice of friction is a cry of pain. It is 
a warning note of danger and always tells 
of or presages disaster. If you will dis- 
sect most of the noises heard in earth, sky, or 
water, you will generally find the above qualities in 




FRICTION 



97 



them. The creak of axle wheels, the whirr and 
noises of machinery, the clash and clatter and roar 
of the street, the boom of the breakers and the 
hoarse noise of the surf, the deafening din of the 
waterfall, the shriek of the cyclone, the moan of 
the wind, the roar of the thunder, the peculiar 
noise that a bullet or shell makes in mid-air, these 
are only the beginnings of the myriad voices of 
friction. 

Though all of these cries come from inanimate 
nature, yet they are the self-same cries that pain is 
ever calling forth from the animate world. Nature 
claims that the rudest bit of gearing and the 
roughest cart wheels can suffer as well as the 
lordliest prince. If pain never cried out the 
world would never succor and help. And the 
voice of pain, whether from the animate or inani- 
mate world, can never be mistaken. 

Friction is a force that acts between two bodies 
at their surface of contact, which resists their slid- 
ing the one upon the other. The amount of this 
force depends upon the force with which the 
bodies are pressed. It is quite easy to see that 
friction is greatest with soft and least with hard 
materials. 

Possibly it is not so well known that friction in 
the matter of wood, metal, and stones varies, so 
long as no abrasion occurs, only with the pressure. 



98 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

and by no means at all varies according to the 
area or surface over which the pressure extends 
or upon the velocity of the moving body. For 
example, friction is the same, no matter how slowly 
or fast your train or cart may go. Friction is the 
same, no matter whether the steel rail of the 
railroad be two inches wide or four or whether 
the tire of your cart wheel be narrow or wide. 
And contrary to general belief, the friction or 
"puir' of belts over pulleys does not depend upon 
the width of the belt. A two-inch belt, doubled 
in thickness and thus made strong, would produce 
as much friction as a four-inch belt. 

Friction is the evil genius, the ^^bete noir'' of 
mechanics. It is friction that ** slows down " all 
motion and finally stops it. What an easy thing 
mechanics would be if we had only to start a thing 
in motion and after that it would go on unaided 
forever. 

The constant aim of mechanics is so to construct 
and conserve that as little force or pull as possible 
is required, or, in other words, to get as near to 
perpetual motion as can be. The nearer to this 
point that mechanics arrives, the less wear and tear 
and abrasion and destruction there will be to all 
engines and machinery. 

I know of no more brilliant example of the 
effects of friction, and that too between the hard- 



FRICTION 99 



est of substances in the thinnest of mediums, than 
is afforded us by meteors. The composition of 
these, by the way, is often almost identical with 
that combination of metals out of which Uncle 
Sam makes the armor plate of his warships, nickel 
steel. And yet a meteor, should it strike our 
atmosphere in a line parallel with the earth and 
thus have a great distance of travel, would soon, 
through friction, heat into a blaze and burn into 
ashes. Large meteors, striking the earth's atmos- 
phere at right angles and thus not having more 
than fifty or sixty miles of distance to travel, often 
strike the earth before complete combustion. 

All of the woods, stones, and metals have differ- 
ing coefficients of friction, and this dissimilarity 
has large meaning in the world of mechanics. 
There is a great number of patented metallic 
compounds that are used for bearings on account 
of their small frictional powers and low conduc- 
tivity of heat. Various parts of engines and ma- 
chines, where there is constant pressure and wear- 
ing motion, have frequently sections of other 
metals inlaid at these points. Your watch is full 
of inlaid jewels on which the tireless pivots of 
scores of wheels rest. Without these anti-friction 
jewels, your watch would never keep time, and your 
bicycle too would be fully as useless without its 
hard steel ball-bearings. 

LofC. 



lOO NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

This planet of ours, high in space, swings safely 
m its orbit without friction. Nothing retards it. 
It never w^ears. In a sense it seems perpetual 
motion. This is on account of the medium or 
rather the lack of medium through which it passes. 
But upon the earth's surface there is, alas, noise 
and clash and clatter, and wearing and heating, 
and one constant cry of inanimate matter that is 
going, through friction, to its destruction. 

Rub up against people if you want to find out 
what kind of people they are. If you wish a 
thorough test, press hard. If you escape without 
friction and heat, set that man down as an equiva- 
lent of a bit of blessed anti-friction metal and 
covered with the best of lubricants. Blessed are 
the '' Babbitt " and '' Magnolia " metal men and 
jewel inlaid men of the world. If all the world 
were like them there would be no friction, and if 
no friction then no noise, no jars, no retarding, no 
stopping, no blocking of the highways. If all 
men were anti-friction men, then this world in 
space would not go more easily and swiftly along 
its way than would this human world that is set 
down on its surface. If there is a worse world 
than this earth, then it is a place of greater fric- 
tion. " And what is heaven like } '' Go into 
some modern engine room. The big driving 



FORMS AND SHAPES lOI 

wheels weigh tons and tons. But in the midst 
of all that whirl of wheels and driving of piston 
rods if you were to shut your eyes you would not 
know that there was indeed a thing in the room. 
All the souls that go to make up heaven are like 
the parts of such a well-oiled, noiseless, anti-friction 
engine. 

The poorest authority on friction in all the uni- 
verse might be an angel in heaven. 

XXIII 

FORMS AND SHAPES 

j|ORDS are always more beautiful when we 
use them in their primal meanings. It is 
a serious thing to place an old word in 
new relationships. It is because our words have 
drifted from their original moorings that the Bible 
seems the quaint and almost antique book which 
it is. The old word **form" needs the above 
preface. In its loftiest meaning it is synonymous 
with essence. Thus, while God made man after 
"his own image," yet it was the Christ only of 
whom it was ever spoken, "who being in the form 
of God." 

Form is an actuality developed. It is a some- 
thing imposed upon an organism by its essence or 




102 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

life, and not by something else, and this imposition 
is done from within and not without. Form is a 
perfected thing and a definite thing and a finality. 
It is an essential and not a non-essential. 

In the material world form is physical structure, 
definite and ultimate, whose life essence has been 
developed into an actuality along the lines of fixed 
order or arrangement. It is by this specific 
formation or disposition or arrangement of this 
manifold matter or parts that one life or essence 
is differentiated from another life. 

Form is the key of the life within. It is by 
form that we know the one from the other, a 
man, a horse, or a lion. A tree has form. It is 
the spirit within that gives the tree its distinct, 
definite, perfected, and essential form. We could 
not give a tree form. It is this form of the tree, 
standing out clear and distinct, that differentiates 
the tree from all other things in this great world 
of creations. God gave it its life and its life's 
outgrowth form to be all its own and to keep. 

Form is nowhere more beautifully illustrated 
than in crystals. The form, perfected, definite, 
and essential, of a given salt or stone is its crys- 
tal. There is something within which fixedly de- 
termines for the spirit of carbon or quartz that its 
ultimate development shall be that form which we 
know as the diamond or the quartz crystal. 



FORMS AND SHAPES IO3 

Our word form is not limited to the material. 
Music has forms. We have, for instance, the 
sonata form and the rondo form. The two spirits 
of these two forms are wholly different. The 
essence of a sonata by no possible manner of 
means can develop into a rondo form. 

When you close your eyes and think pictures, 
or when at night you dream dreams, if you see in 
these one single form, then this form is necessarily 
specialized and determined for it and is imposed 
upon it by a spirit or essence within. Our minds 
must think in spirits or essence, and these spirits 
must develop into forms which our eyes see. 
Dreams are the real things that they are because 
we see not merely shapes but forms. 

A tree is no less a tree because storms or other 
agencies have caused it to lean to the north, south, 
east, or west, or have twisted it into knots or 
gnarls, or because these agencies have shorn it 
largely of its limbs and foliage. These conditions 
are mere shapes. 

We know something of what the essence of a 
cloud is, and we know that this essence, devel- 
oped, takes on a certain form which we call a 
cloud, yet our cloud takes on new shapes with 
each new puff of the breeze. These shapes are 
the non-essentials, the indefinites, the unsubstan- 
tials of cloud life. 



I04 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

Nature gives us our total idea of forms. The 
whole world is full of forms, individual and spe- 
cific, and these forms are mostly beautiful. For 
nature is meant to be helpful, and helpful things 
are good things, and an essence that is good must 
develop into a form that is beautiful. 

It is only the developed, the definite, the com- 
plete things that have forms. If 5^ou are indiffer- 
ent and if your life is indefinite, nothing grows out 
of your life but shapes. And it is surely no small 
part of the world's men and women whose charac- 
ters, all unformed, are liable to assume daily new 
shapes. 

There is, as I have said, no entity, material or 
immaterial, that is complete which does not have 
its definite form. God, the risen Christ, the angel 
host, and cherubim and seraphim, all have forms. 
You and I, rid of the material, must have forms 
as definite and as knowable as those we have to- 
day. John, who saw aloft the redeemed in bright 
array, saw forms that were the essentials of the 
spirit within. And since in the material kingdom, 
as is well known, forms grow all the more wonder- 
ful and majestic as we ascend the scale of being, 
so we can only imagine what may be the majesty 
and glory of all of heaven's higher forms, forms 
that perhaps are beyond all earthly ken. 



LUBRICANTS, THE PEACEMAKERS IO5 

XXIV 

LUBRICANTS, THE PEACEMAKERS 



HERE is no such thing as a perfect anti- 
friction metal. There are no metals on 
earth that being rubbed together fast 
enough and hard enough, would not ignite and 
burn up; nor if rubbed together more slowly with 
pressure, would not wear wholly away. Such a 
rubbing too would draw forth from the metal a 
creaking and a crying as if it were indeed suffer- 
ing pain. 

The antidote for all friction, and friction-noise 
is oil, lubricant oil, whether of mineral, vegetable, 
or animal origin. There is not a piece of machin- 
ery that has wheels, cranks, pistons, or pivots, no 
matter how simple, — from the tiniest watch to the 
biggest Mogul, and from a wheelbarrow to a vesti- 
bule train, — but whose very life, so far as motion 
is concerned, does not absolutely depend upon 
lubricants. Friction is a state of war. Friction 
in the end means annihilation ! 

Now the office of lubricating oil is a beautiful 
and interesting one. Oil, to begin with, is made 
up of oil globules. If a thin constant film of oil is 
made to flow between two bearings, the bearings 
will rest on this oil film and as a matter of fact 



I06 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

will never touch each other and will not therefore 
heat and wear. Moreover, the bearings glide 
easily and smoothly because they rest on oil glob- 
ules which move among themselves almost with- 
out friction and with a swiftness and smoothness 
almost inconceivable. The oil globules thus be- 
come peacemakers as between that which without 
them would be warring factions. 

That surfaces ideally lubricated do not at any 
point touch, because of this oil film made up of oil- 
balls, is easily proven. An engineer, only a few 
days ago, was telling me of a certain famous en- 
gine in England whose plan or method of lubrica- 
tion was so absolutely perfect, that when it was 
taken to pieces after six years of running, it was 
found that certain tiny marks on the metal, left by 
the workmen, which friction in a few days would 
have worn away, were still left intact, unrubbed 
and untouched ! 

There are certain qualities that it is patent all 
lubricants must possess. They must possess suf- 
ficient body to keep surfaces that are under pres- 
sure, free from contact. An oil as thin and light 
in density as is corn oil should not serve as a 
lubricant. Again, the oil must possess fluidity ; 
it is just as possible to have too heavy and sticky 
an oil as too light an oil. That sticky, gummy, 
gritty, dusty substance that you see on so much 



LUBRICANTS, THE PEACEMAKERS lO/ 

machinery is not a perfect lubricant ; in truth, it 
is about as harmful as helpful. The oil too must 
have capacity for storing heat, and it must have a 
high flash or burning point. An oil that is not 
cooling to the parts, and that at the lower tempera- 
ture decomposes and burns up, would be valueless 
as a lubricant. And lastly, the oil must have no 
corrosive action on the metals. 

Now there are the greatest number of oils that 
fail in some of these points. The lubricating oils 
are the few and not the many. 

Oils must always be adapted to the individual 
machinery or engine, and according as to whether 
there is much or little pressure, or fast or slow 
speed. 

Lubricant oils, as a rule, weigh seven and a half 
pounds to the gallon. And a one thousand horse 
power engine will theoretically use per annum 
about two and a half barrels of cylinder oil. 
There has been great advance in the past decade 
in the methods of supplying oils to machines, so 
as to give a constant flow and a film that is evenly 
distributed all over the surface, and so also as to 
keep out all dust. If these three points could be 
attained in all machinery, and just the right oil in 
all cases be used, the life of machinery would 
scarcely, so far as friction is concerned, have an 
end. 



I08 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

A peacemaker is one who stands between con- 
tending parties, and who is himself under pressure 
from both parties, yet who through peculiar inher- 
ent qualities on his part receives no harm himself, 
and yet who at the same time prevents actual con- 
tact and consequent friction on the part of the 
contestants. The highest term of approbation in 
the Bible is <* blessed," and it is this term that is 
applied to peacemakers. 

Now if mechanics can find a lubricant for each 
individual kind of machinery, if all the wheels and 
axles and pistons and pivots of earth can be kept 
at peace with their environment and can be by 
this means made to move so smoothly and swiftly 
and easily and noiselessly, is it not strange, then, 
that human wisdom, to say nothing of Christian- 
ity, has not done more to make peace among 
nations and individuals ? Are wars necessities } 
And how much of litigation is not only useless 
but absolutely immoral and criminal ! How all 
the bickerings and brawls and cruel blows and 
curses must sound, up in the ears of heaven — 
sound, aye, even worse than would all the sounds 
from unoiled axles and wheels and saws and pistons 
combined, of earth. 

If universal peace on earth is ever to come, it 
will not be till every man is converted into the 
similitude of a lubricant made up of oil balls easily 



HEAT CONDUCTORS IO9 

moving among themselves and possessing fluidity 
and heavy enough to bear burdens and so prevent 
harsh contact as between all contestants. The 
human lubricant too, in order to be a peacemaker, 
must possess the power of storing heat; the 
power of always presenting a cool surface ; the 
power too, of possessing a high flash point. The 
human lubricant would fail utterly if he by any 
means possessed qualities that were corrosive in 
their nature to any surface. 

Human lubricants — nations and individuals — 
are badly wanted in the world just now and have 
been for years past. I fear that the mere con- 
queror, the commerce-seeker, and the goldhunter 
are abroad in the world and that they are creating 
a deal of friction. Perhaps there are other ways 
of bringing about results that make for civilization 
than through cruel war, extermination, and blood- 
shed! 

XXV 

HEAT CONDUCTORS 

|HE first and great necessity for this world 
of ours is heat. This universe, perhaps, 
could not have a greater cataclysm befall 
it than to have all heat taken away from our solar 
system, thus reducing our magnificent planets to 



no NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

the desolate and lifeless conditions found in the 
moon. Heat, therefore, occupying this highest 
position, gives a high relative position to all ob- 
jects that seem closest allied and most friendly to 
it. In fact, so important is this point, that we 
have actually an arrangement of the solids, liq- 
uids, and gases of the earth, according to the in- 
tensity of their resistance to the general dissemi- 
nation of heat. The degree of resistance or non- 
resistance of them all has been measured and set 
down. This whole question is covered by the term 
*' conduction of heat." Our theorem, then, is that 
things possess quality according to their individual 
heat conductivity. Now here is a list of a few 
solids, showing their relative heat conductivity in 
degrees: silver, loo; copper, 73.6; gold, 53.2; 
tin, 14.5; iron, 11.9; steel, 11.6; lead, 8.5; 
platinum, 8.4. A good common rule for finding 
out the conduction of heat, and so quality, is 
simply to determine density. Next in density to 
the metals come stones ; next come hard woods 
(dry woods are better conductors than wet, and 
woods lengthwise with the grain better than across 
grain) ; then come liquids ; while gases are such 
diffused substances that they posses almost no 
appreciable conductivity. All spongy articles are 
poor conductors, because they are full of air. We 
thus see why a laundry flat-iron is made out of iron 



HEAT CONDUCTORS III 



rather than stone or wood ; and we see how, when 
the ironer wants an obstruction against the heat, 
she puts cloth about the flatiron handle. 

Now, as far as the temperature is concerned of 
wool, sponge, rock, or iron, the thermometer 
might show the same degree of heat in them all. 
But if you place your finger upon iron, the metal 
carries away the heat of your hand so fast that 
the hand is left with the sense of cold, whereas 
the poor conductivity of wool actually gives the 
hand the sensation of warmth. 

Certainly one of the marvels of nature is the 
action of water (and air acts in the samxC way) 
when heat is applied to it. If water and air were 
immobile like iron, then great distress would follow 
to humanity. It is most fortunate, indeed, that 
water is an imperfect conductor. If we had to 
wait for our water to boil through simple heat con- 
duction, then we would not get our morning coffee 
till after breakfast, if at all. But nature heats our 
coffee in another way, and so evades the hardships 
that the loss of heat conductivity would entail 
upon us, by circulating the water — the bottom hot 
stratum rising at once to the top, and the succeed- 
ing stratum observing the same rule, and so on. 
This is called heating by convection. Hot air 
likewise rises from the earth, and cooler strata are 
continually taking its place. 



112 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

Heat and electricity both being modes of mo- 
tion, and being therefore closely allied, we expect 
naturally to find that heat conductivity and elec- 
trical conductivity are about equal in the same 
substance. Indeed, the sordid electrical man 
would give millions if he could subvert the conduc- 
tion laws that obtain among all metals ; it would 
mean fortunes to him if he could substitute iron 
for his costly copper wires. But copper, he must 
have, because he wants to push forward his waves 
as fast and as far as he can and with least resist- 
ance. He must have wires of high conductive 
power, or else his current, always seeking lines of 
least resistance, might be diverted and so lost to 
him for the purpose desired. 

Now, to return to heat : if the m.etals were not 
the fine conductors that they are, you might have 
to weigh out your gold and silver in dust form and 
pass them as currency without the government 
stamp and without the emblematic goddess of 
liberty or the great American eagle. If the 
metals were not the good conductors they are, 
there could not be wrought out one single iron or 
steel structure, or machine, or railroad rail. Gold 
and silver would largely lose their value as moneys, 
and the other metals would lose their value for 
strength and for their ten thousand other pur- 
poses, if metals w^ere as poor conductors of heat 



HEAT CONDUCTORS II3 

as are air and water. And if this earth were 
not the fair conductor of heat that it is, then 
spring might take half the year for her coming, 
and in fact might never come at all. 

The grand pronuncianiento of the angels was 
** Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace and 
good will '' ; and every man on earth is expected 
to be a personal disseminator of this greatest of 
all rules of action. Oh, the faces of men, if men 
were love-conductors and not the obstructionists 
that they are, would glow and shine like the 
metals that are heated to white heat in the fire ! 
What does the infinitely white raiment of heaven, 
and what do the shining faces of the angels and 
redeemed signify but this 1 God must rate men 
as the chemist rates his metals — according to 
whether they are good or poor conductors of the 
divinest of heaven*s laws. It is of tremendous 
moment to you and me in the moral world to 
know that silver means lOO, tin 14.05, lead 8.05, 
and gas practically o ! 

I can imagine that at some remote time in the 
past, water made lament to nature, that under the 
universal law of conduction it could be of so 
little use in the world. Nature was kind ; and 
she put that added power into water whereby it 
could convey heat as quickly as precious metals. 



iI4 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

Perhaps this same plaint daily comes up to God 
from the humble human being. Could God be 
less kind than nature ? Cannot the weakest, low- 
liest being on earth, get added power for the ask- 
ing ? Has not God sent his almighty Spirit into 
the world for this specific purpose ? Can any man 
at last at the bar of heaven plead that it was im- 
possible for him on earth to rank in conductive 
power even with silver and gold ? 



XXVI 

THE CENTER OF GR.\VITY 



^S^aHE gravity of the earth is ever pulling 
^9kI every terrestrial object down to itself. 
1=^™ These pulls are exerted in parallel lines, 
and the resultant of these parallel forces always 
passes through a point in the given object which is 
called the object's center of gravity. At this point, 
or center of gravity, the whole mass of the body 
may be considered as concentrated. And if the 
body is supported at this point it will, if acted 
upon by gravity alone, balance in every position. 
It is not difficult in uniform bodies that are cir- 
cular or square to arrive at the position of this 
center of gravity. But every object, whether it 
is a regular and geometrical figure, or whether it 



THE CENTER OF GRAVITY I I 5 

is an irregular, heterogeneous mass, has its center 
of gravity ; and it is possible always to find out 
this point with mathematical precision. In all tall 
or vertical objects the base of the support and the 
vertical line passing through the center of gravity 
must be carefully looked after, for the instant that 
line, along which the earth^s resultant force pro- 
ceeds, falls outside the object's base, the whole 
object must needs topple over and fall to the 
ground. The brick mason who builds a wall 
understands the true value of a base and vertical 
line. In felling trees I have often seen a tree so 
straight, and with limbs and foliage radiated so 
uniformly on every hand, that although it was cut 
in half on two sides it yet remained standing, and 
the axe man would have to push it in order to make 
it fall, while the center of gravity of other trees 
was so far outside of their base that with a small 
amount of cutting they would come crashing down. 
Of course a leaning tree could never for a moment 
stand and so maintain its integrity if it were not 
that the roots like so many ropes kept it in the air. 
Few things are more ridiculous than is the at- 
tempt at walking of a duck, whose legs are after 
all chiefly paddles, and which by no means fit into 
the body at the center of gravity point. The 
center of gravity of birds that fly and live in the 
air is different from that of the birds that make 



Il6 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

their living on foot. Because he leans forward and 
has therefore lost his former center of gravity, the 
old man must needs walk with a stick. In fact 
the various gaits of men, and indeed of all animals, 
are dependent mostly upon where within the body 
they place the center of gravity — this position in 
the case of men being quite optional. The teacher 
of calisthenics in teaching one how to stand and 
how to carry himself and how to walk, is mostly 
teaching him just where to place his center of 
gravity. Things that lean, through w^iatever cause 
it be, and so make it possible that the resultant line 
of gravity-force may fall outside of their base, are 
a constant danger to themselves and to everything 
about them. 

Of all forms on earth that are least liable to a 
wreck through a change of their center of gravity 
is a pyramid. The center of gravity in this figure 
is on a straight line drawn from the vertex to the 
middle of the base and one-fourth the distance up. 
How difficult it would be to make a pyramid topple 
over is thus readily seen. And this certainly is the 
reason why mountains are given by nature pyramidal 
shapes^ and why mountains, probably because of 
those shapes, are regarded as the most steadfast 
and sure things of earth. The center of gravity 
of a train of cars on a straight line is different 
from that of the same train on a curve. There- 



THE CENTER OF GRAVITY II7 

fore, to remedy this on all railroad curves the out- 
side rails are higher than the inside. Astronomers 
have been greatly worried to find some central sun 
about which all starry systems revolve — some given 
point that is in reality the center of gravity, that 
might therefore be considered as the centralization 
of the total mass of the universe. But such a 
point has never definitely been found. 

It may be within the range of possibility that 
the center of gravity of the universe may be 
heaven. It matters not whether heaven is or is 
not a material place. The center of gravity of a 
system may be as well as not out in empty space. 
If it is true, as it is, that the center of gravity of 
an object is that point at which we may consider 
all of the object as being concentrated, then this 
idea comports well with the thought that heaven 
could well be, whether it really be or not, the cen- 
tralization point of the universe. 

Of far greater importance perhaps than is the 
position of the center of gravity of our physical 
body, is the question of the center of gravity of 
our soul and spirit. It makes all the difference in 
the world as to just where the concentration of our 
being may be. It makes all the difference in the 
world as to whether within us the resultant line of 
force or pull falls outside or inside of its base. 



Il8 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

People that have no base have no stability. To 
stand, with them, is an impossibility. And like- 
wise, the narrow-base men must stand exceedingly 
circumspect or they fall. 

A duck that is trying almost in vain to walk is 
not a more ludicrous sight than are hundreds and 
thousands of men whose concentration or center 
of gravity is in a different place from that which 
they would have it appear. Such people are con- 
stantly wobbling and falling. 

We must not forget that the ideal geometrical 
figure for stability is the pyramid. The base is 
broad and the centre of gravity is not high from 
the base. There is a spot somewhere within us 
where God lives. Is that point, or some other 
point, our center of gravity.'* Is that spot, or 
some other spot, the concentration of our being ? 

XXVII 

BY-PRODUCTS SOMETIMES CALLED *' WASTE " 

JASTE '' is another name for ignorance. 
In the economy of nature there is no 
such thing or term as *' waste.'* Nature 
intended, wherever and howsoever the multitudes 
are fed, that the basketfuls of the remainder should 
be taken up and used. Indeed, the more intelli- 




BY-PRODUCTS SOMETIMES CALLED '' WASTE" II9 

gent the human race or single man becomes the 
less final loss there is, the greater the saving, the 
greater the number of commercial " rescue mis- 
sions," the more valuable become the by-products, 
and the greater their adaptation and conversion 
into all manner of glorious uses. 

I know of no more interesting plants than are 
our cotton-waste factories. I look upon them all 
as philanthropic and intensely moral institutions. 
Here are the leavings of the spinners and the 
looms, the floor sweepings of the mills, and the 
yard sweepings of cotton warehouses, the waste (?) 
of the woolen mills, the tired out cotton bagging 
and the worn-out carpets, behold these and much 
more are all gathered here — an inglorious company 
— and are made into new and bright forms, and 
are sent out daily to the four corners of the world 
to serve the needs of mankind. 

Down on the plantation ask the farmer if he 
throws away the " waste " (?) from his cows and 
oxen and horses and pigs and sheep. He will 
point you to black heaps on the fields to be spread 
out and turned under ; and later he will show you 
growing crops made all the more luxuriant by this 
fertilization that they received. 

Look for a moment at the product of the cotton 
boll out of which come the garments of the world, 
and the white wings that sail over the seas in the 



I20 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

cause of commerce. There was a time when cot- 
ton seed was largely an absolute waste. To-day 
our cotton oil mills manufacture from these seeds 
many grades of cotton oil (for medicine and illu- 
mination and for food). They manufacture linters, 
which are the sawed-off, short cotton fibre as 
taken from the seeds, and the once rejected cot- 
ton-seed hulls are to-day a prime cattle food, and 
are made also into paper. A second by-product — 
a by-product of a by-product — is the soap stock 
from the oil refuse. And every new use of, or 
increased value of these by-products, increases the 
value of the original cotton boll in the field of the 
farmer. 

By-products are the delight of the chemist. 
The German laboratories are daily startling the 
medical and commercial world with their new 
products among the '^ wastes '' (?). See all of that 
helpful and wonderful group made from " waste " (i^), 
and which the doctors call *' the coal-tar products" ! 
Look at the marvelously lustrous and permanent 
dye colors made by the Germans from this self- 
same vile-looking stuff. The pine trees that stand 
in the forest, the material coefficient for the building 
of the dwelling-places and homes of all the dwell- 
ers in houses — this pine tree when cut up and put 
into heated retorts, turns out scores of wondrous 
oils and acids. Out in the Alabama iron mills 



BY-PRODUCTS SOMETIMES CALLED '' WASTE" 121 

they are finding new uses for the slag of the fur- 
naces. And the generated noxious gases they are 
now using for heretofore unthought-of purposes. 
We shall not go further. There is to-day a great 
and shining host of *' lifted up '' things that if they 
had tongues would shout hallelujahs ! The magi- 
cians of to-day — descendants of Fairy Aladdin — 
are calling up wonders out of the sea and air and 
soil and rocks, and out of dust and out of ash 
heaps. He who finds a new use for a by-product 
is adding to the world's store of wealth and well- 
being and comfort. He is the world's benefactor. 

Think you that I am carrying my parallel too 
far when I think that I see analogous things in 
the religious life ? 

If I read my Bible aright, I believe that I find 
that faith is the primal thing. Faith is the thing 
I find that saves me. And this is reasonable and 
logical. The highest honor one can pay to man, 
angel, or God, is to have faith in him. Faith is 
the basis of all civilized life. Our banks without 
faith would close to-morrow. Nobody would de- 
posit money, and I am sure nobody could borrow 
money, without faith. 

But there are by-products of faith that shine 
Hke stars for beauty. They go along with faith, 
but Christians utilize them to a greater or more 



122 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

limited extent — and some Christians scarcely at all. 
I conceive that a man can have saving faith, and 
yet possess the minutest amount of the Christian 
graces. But among Christians of the higher order 
he would not be much more useful than is a savage 
when compared with a civilized, cultured man. 

The by-products of faith, as I take it, are charity, 
kindness, unselfishness, truth, hope, patience, 
beauty, and many more. And then come all the 
Christly commands — beautiful to obey. And a 
man who uses all of these by-products is indeed 
only ''3. little lower than the angels," and is him- 
self blessed among men. 

God has made salvation a very simple thing. He 
has not made it dependent upon signs and wonder 
workings. But there is not a manufacturing lab- 
oratory on earth that should be half so full of physi- 
cal by-products as should the ideal Christian's life 
be full of the by-products of his faith. 

XXVIII 

OVERTONES, OR FULLNESS OF LIFE 

|T is one thing to make a simple tone. It 
is quite another thing to make a note. A 
note is complex ; it involves besides the 
fundamental tone also what are known as over- 




OVERTONES, OR FULLNESS OF LIFE 123 

tones. The overtone is what I shall call the full- 
ness of life of music. It is everywhere the test of 
the musician and of the musical instrument. Pitch 
is dependent upon vibration. From twenty-seven 
and a half vibrations per second, the lowest note on 
the grand piano, vibrations reach as high on this in- 
strument as four thousand two hundred and twenty- 
four, the highest note. Middle C is 258.65 and 
its octave above is double, or 517.3. If we strike 
middle C string, it vibrates along its whole length 
two hundred and fifty-eight vibrations per second, 
and we have C tone and pitch ; but if music stopped 
here, there would scarcely be a musical instrument 
on earth or a harp in heaven. Happily music 
does not end, it rather begins here. For our fun- 
damental tone, produced by the vibration of the 
whole string, is greatly reinforced by other tones 
(their number varying with the quality of the 
sonorous body), the complex result making music 
the beautiful and helpful thing that it is. 

These reinforcing tones, harmonies, or over- 
tones, are ever on the ascending or upward scale ; 
thank heaven for that ! Harmonies could never 
be undertones; for to produce them we must have 
a longer string than that of our fundamental tone. 

The cause of the overtone lies just here: When- 
ever a string vibrates throughout its whole length, 
it also vibrates in one-halves, one-thirds, one-fourths, 



124 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

etc. Middle C piano string vibrates as a whole 
two hundred and fifty-eight per second ; its two 
halves vibrate each with double the vibrations of 
the single string, or five hundred and seventeen 
per second, which tone is one octave above. The 
string also divides into three parts and four parts 
— each one-third or one-fourth part vibrating with 
three or four times as many vibrations as the whole 
string, giving us thus still higher tones than the 
octave. There may be besides these five, six, 
seven, eight, or twelve, or possibly infinite central 
segments in vibration. 

The proof of the overtone is to be found in the 
violin. Frequently the player after making a 
fundamental note, will shut this note off entirely 
by putting his finger on the middle, or one-third, 
or elsewhere of the string. The result will be 
overtones alone sounding high, clear, and sweet. 

Above all instruments and strings the human 
voice is capable of greatest richness of overtones. 
The vocal chords of a superlative prima donna in 
her best notes would vibrate so as to make the 
most complex overtones ; indeed, her whole phys- 
ical being, in sympathy, would vibrate. If she 
stood upon glass, this too would vibrate ; and fine 
sand placed thereon would resolve into certain in- 
dividual shapes that we might call the musical sig- 
nature of the singer ! 



OVERTONES, OR FULLNESS OF LIFE 125 

Besides the matter of hearing, science shows us 
that we, as regards our other senses, are dependent 
upon vibrations. Without vibrations the great 
suns of the universe could shed no light out into 
the infinite darkness. But it is only in the more 
recent past that we have come to know that life 
and thought and emotion are also dependent upon 
vibration. There could be no life without vibra- 
tions. Cessation of vibrations means death. Any 
force that interrupts this perfect rhythmic vibra- 
tion means discord, which is illness. Vibrations are 
our only source of impressions. Our soul, which 
is our subliminal self, stands in relationship to our 
bodies and our environments as does the organist 
who sits before the organ, which is itself dumb, 
but being struck, swells and thrills with tones and 
overtones. The perfect soul is thus a vibrant, 
creative center. The world is full of its vibrations. 
Not one is ever lost ! 

The law of vibration is perfect. The discour- 
agement is the faulty instrument that gives us so 
few overtones; and on the other hand the non-im- 
pressionable dullards who cannot hear. For true 
it is that if the tympana of our ears, minds, and 
hearts do not thrill with and in unison with the 
varied incoming waves, then we might as well have 
ears of stone. Marconi can set the waves of ether 



126 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

three thousand miles all in vibratory thrill ; but if 
there is only stock or stone over on the other 
shore, or perchance an electrical instrument that 
is not attuned with Marconi's, then Europe can 
never get our messages. 

For the sending out of light there is betwixt 
sun and earth intermediate vibrant ether. So be- 
tween heaven and earth and God and man there is 
in all truth a medium just as perfect as that made 
for light, or sound, or other sense. You never 
had a thought of God, proceeding from this vibrant 
creative center of yours, but faster than light, God 
knew it! And if we vrere not the dullards that 
we are, God could never have a thought of us but 
that we would be far more receptive to it than is 
the photographer's sensitized plate to light-waves. 

The ether of the moral universe is all athrill 
with thought. What joy means this to sublimated 
redeemed, and angels, and what converse and com- 
munion — time and distance and dull sense all an- 
nihilated ! This sluggish earth will be lifted ever 
up into the greater fullness of life, and sickness 
and pain and death will to the larger degree be 
driven away, the more impressionable the more 
correctly attuned it becomes. 

Above all of nature's sounds and those of man- 
made instruments, God made the human voice — 
of wondrous and aboundins: tones — to be the 



THINGS HOMOGENEOUS 12/ 

sweetest and richest. And God likewise in our 
whole individual life of deed and thought and emo- 
tions, has surely some royal thought for us that 
does not compass simply and alone fundamental 
notes, but also a myriad of overtones ! What over- 
tone fullness of life have we ? How far removed 
are we from the dullard, or how close to the senti- 
ent seraph ! 

XXIX 

THINGS HOMOGENEOUS 



SUBSTANCE is homogeneous when all 
of its parts are of only one kind, when 
there is congruity of constitution, when 
there is agreement in elements and likeness and 
correspondence in characteristics. 

Pour iron filings and sulphur together or water 
and oil and your product masses will be hetero- 
geneous and not homogeneous. Our substances 
will not strictly mix, and by simple mechanical 
means you can separate again and isolate their 
component parts. Take alcohol and mix it with 
any one of a large number of the fluids and you 
get products that have agreement and likeness in 
all of their parts, products that are congruous and 
homogeneous. 



128 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

The earth's soil is heterogeneous. Examine 
with a microscope any selected portion of it and 
this fact is easily seen. The various rocks are 
largely heterogeneous. Externally they show 
streaks of many colors or of varying hardness. 
Granite is composed of three component parts 
that are all visible. Pound a bit of granite — 
Scotch, Quincy, or Georgia — in a pestle, and with 
a microscope you can mechanically isolate its 
parts. In all boulders and conglomerates and 
stones these incongruous parts can be easily seen. 
It is a simple matter to detect mica, iron, pyrite, 
or quartz, in almost any compound rock that you 
pick up. Most of the precious metals as found 
in the rocks are easily and separately discoverable 
and at the same time can be isolated by mechanical 
means. 

On the other hand, the water (hydrogen oxide) 
that we drink is a compound mass that is homo- 
geneous. All parts of water have the same char- 
acteristics, and you cannot separate water by 
mechanical means, but only by chemical means. 
Lime (calcium oxide), quartz (silicon oxide), salt 
(sodium chloride), sulphuric acid (sulphur, oxygen, 
and hydrogen), nitric acid (nitrogen, oxygen, and 
hydrogen), are all homogeneous. Fine marbles 
are homogeneous substances. That beautiful com- 
pany known as crystals and crystalline formations 



THINGS HOMOGENEOUS 1 29 

are homogeneous substances. Copperas (sulphate 
of iron) and bluestone (sulphate of copper) are 
well-known homogeneous substances. There is 
not one of the above homogeneous substances 
whose component parts can at any time be iso- 
lated mechanically. Not only this, but in each 
case the union of all its component parts has 
given a product, as we have seen, that is a new 
fabrication and a new creature and with new 
properties. 

Heat is a large factor in the production of ho- 
mogeneous compounds. Mix to your heart's con- 
tent in a cold retort copper filings and zinc filings 
and you can accomplish no union of the two. 
You can in turn sort out and so separate again 
both the copper and zinc. But put fire under your 
retort and melt your zinc and copper and you will 
find that your cooled product is another and a 
homogeneous substance known as brass. To ex- 
amine this brass will almost lead you to believe, 
so beautifully homogeneous is it, that brass is one 
of the simples and not one of the company of the 
compounds. Copper, zinc, and nickel filings will 
never mechanically unite. But a heated retort full 
of them shows, when cooled, a product just as per- 
fectly homogeneous as is brass, a product known as 
German silver. There are among the metals about 
one dozen that unite in various ways to produce 



130 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

about thirty compounds known as alloys. These 
alloys are all homogeneous. They, while they are 
plainly compounds of the original metals, are just 
as evidently new metal and with new uses and new 
properties. These new and homogeneous com- 
pounds, formed out of the heterogeneous, all be- 
long to the domain of chemistry. 

A conglomerate, made up of several rocks, is 
not of much use to lapidary or builder. You 
could not polish such a stone for the life of you. 
They are stones too, for the builder, of inferior and 
unequal strength. Their principal use in New 
England, where they abound, is in the building of 
fences, for what does a real estate owner care if 
the fences of his fields do show that the rocks 
thereof are but a patchwork in stones ? 

Now we have seen just such people. They 
have good parts and they have distinctively and 
separately parts that are quite bad. In colloquial 
language they might be said to be made up of a 
streak of lean here and a streak of fat there and 
something else yonder. You can see in them, as 
in conglomerates, separate bits of mica and iron 
and quartz and pyrite scattered here and there. 
You feel sure that you could sort them out into 
their varied component parts. Such people are 
plainly not homogeneous. They are, on the con- 



VISCOSITY I 3 1 



trary, heterogeneous, and they fall short by this 
much. 

God, I must believe, never intended that the 
human and divine in us should be mingled and 
mixed as in the conglomerate. This seems clear 
from the use in the Bible of the term '^ new crea- 
ture,'' as applied to the human being who in faith 
has received the Spirit of God. No conglomerate 
in the nature world is ever known as a new fabri- 
cation. This term is applied only to those com- 
pounds that are homogeneous, such as German 
silver, brass, copperas, bluestone, marble, etc. 

The '^ new creature" of the Bible is a being 
whom you could not mechanically dissect. He is 
not made up of varying strata or glacial products. 
It would be impossible to find in him just where 
the divine left off and the human began, or vice 
versa. He is not man, he is not God ; he is in 
all truth and verity a ^'new creature." 

XXX 

VISCOSITY 

FLUID is a substance that, being acted 
upon at a given point, continuously yields 
with continuously decreasing deforma- 
tion. The antithesis of this is the solid, which is 




132 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

a body that, being brought into a condition of stress 
and deformation, retains that new shape so long as 
this condition of stress is continued. A rigid solid 
can be defined as a substance that, being acted 
upon, knows no yielding. An ideal rigid solid, 
therefore, would be a substance which, no matter 
if all the stress of this world were applied to it, 
would experience no deformation, no strain. This 
is an ideal. No substance is absolutely rigid. 
There are for all substances on all sides deforming 
forces and a consequent yielding strain and de- 
formation. The bodies that we call rigid solids 
are in practice all found to yield. Iron and any 
of the other metals, when acted upon in small 
masses, demonstrate that they are not rigid. 

While, in strict truth, rigidity therefore is not a 
thing of comparison, and no rigid substance is to 
be spoken of as being '' more " or '' less " rigid, yet 
in daily practice rigidity is a thing of degree. 
The various solids differ widely in the matter of 
rigidity and differ in their yielding power, and ex- 
hibit, under stress, various degrees of deformation. 

When we begin to classify substances along this 
line we meet with strange facts. Jelly, though 
soft and easily deformed, is not a fluid because it 
does not flow ; it is therefore, a true solid. Bees- 
wax, sealing-wax, pitch, and paraffine, though not 
easily deformed, are true fluids. If a cake of cob- 



VISCOSITY 133 



bier's wax is placed in water, with bullets on top 
of it and corks under it, the bullets and corks will 
traverse it in opposite directions. These sub- 
stances will fall or rise, according to their relative 
weights, and the wax will flow around them. 
While these substances are true fluids, yet their 
flow is extremely slow, their resistance to flow 
being extremely great. 

The term for resistance to flow is viscosity. 
The glacier that so slowly flows down moun- 
tain gorges, wax, molasses, syrup, weak syrup, 
cold water, alcohol, hot water, ether — are ex- 
amples of liquids whose flow is successively the 
more rapid, and whose viscosity, therefore, or re- 
sistance to flow, is successively the less. As there 
is in nature no such substance as an absolutely 
rigid solid, so likewise we may state that there is 
no substance that possesses perfect absence of 
viscosity or perfect mobility. 

If we conceive of a fluid that is of infinite vis- 
cosity or immobility whose resistance to flow is 
infinitely great, we can easily see that there would 
be practically no difference between this fluid and 
a perfectly rigid solid. Water under great pres- 
sure in the seven-mile depths of ocean possesses 
far greater viscosity than at ocean's surface. The 
center of the earth is a subject of intense interest. 
We must believe that this center, on account of 



134 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

heat, is a fluid. It has been computed that the 
pressure at this center is something like forty-five 
million pounds per square inch. This pressure, 
then, must be so great that its mass, under force 
and stress, behaves exactly as if it were indeed a 
rigid solid. From this earth's center — an approxi- 
mately rigid solid — wq should have to conceive of 
the fluid mass outwardly growing softer and more 
soft till we arrive at a thin mobile fluid of no great 
viscosity upon which this twenty-five miles of 
earth's crust floats. 

Earth's center, therefore, affords us theoretically 
our best example of perfect rigidity. Probably no 
force or stress, as known, could cause in it defor- 
mation or strain. All the battering rams of the 
ancients and all the cannons of to-day could not 
harm it. It is the one immobile, immovable, 
steadfast thing, without deformation, in this mate- 
rial kingdom of our earth. 

In the moral world the thing that is immovable 
and steadfast, the thing that under stress even the 
most severe shows no strain and deflection and 
deformation, is of all things the one thing the 
most necessary. If I lay a tenpenny nail upon 
an iron anvil there results here a certain deforma- 
tion. This deformation is so minute that it be- 
comes an immaterial matter and not a vital one to 



VISCOSITY 135 



mechanics, but if the forces of all of this world 
were exerted against truth and truth yielded, then 
heaven itself would be unstable, insecure, and as- 
sailable. For truth is not truth and heaven is not 
heaven if in them there is the shadow of turning. 

It is of greatest comfort to know here in this 
world of little viscosity, as applied either to mate- 
rial objects or human kind, that there is a place of 
perfect rigidity and of infinite viscosity, a place 
immovable and eternally the same. 

The farther one goes away from truth and 
heaven and God, the more mobile and the less 
resistance to flow, the more yielding he becomes. 
Hell would be a place where, from a moral stand- 
point, there is an entire absence of viscosity, a 
place of infinite mobility. 

How the Deity in pity must look upon the 
human being whom he sees yielding at some 
point almost every moment of his life ! And 
how much such a human being needs God, whose 
promises to him are immovably sure and are cer- 
tain of fulfillment. 

Infinite viscosity and perfect rigidity of sub- 
stance in all the kingdoms would mean that which 
all the forces of earth or hell could not assail to 
the point of its slightest deformation. Against all 
onslaughts, all temptations, it would remain for- 
ever safe, secure, invincible, and unyielding. 




136 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

XXXI 

RADIATION OF HEAT 

ITHOUT heat there can be no genesis of 
Ufe. This appHes as well to a world as 
it does to the smallest seed-capsule or 
blade of grass. The moon is dead because there 
is no heat in the moon. This earth, as well per- 
haps as the other planets, is clothed with verdure 
and filled with animal life because of heat. Now 
heat, good mother that she is, cannot be self-sus- 
tained. Heat, perforce, must manifest itself, and 
must reach out and aid everything about it that is 
less fortunate than itself. 

We expect luminous bodies like the sun to send 
out heat (as well as light), but it is not always so 
easy to see that even the non-luminous bodies are 
continually exercising this function. But take any 
body containing heat, place a thermometer on 
every side about it, and the thermometer at each 
place will rise in temperature, no matter whether 
the thermometer be in a vacuum or in air; the 
higher the temperature in the source, the higher 
will be the rise of the mercury in the thermometer. 
Place a hot and cold body near each other, and the 
heated one will continue to lose its heat to the cold 
one, till both bodies are in equilibrium. And in 



RADIATION OF HEAT 1 37 

truth even after there is a state of equiUbrium, 
this continual radiation of heat goes on between 
the two ; but as each receives as much heat as it 
remits, the temperature in both remains constant. 
Now it would seem almost unfair and unrighteous 
that the colder body should have been allowed to 
thus rob its fellow. But such is the law of heat. 

There are bodies that radiate their heat more 
rapidly than others. And there are bodies that 
absorb heat much more rapidly than others. These 
are matters of daily test, and in the scientific and 
practical world these two facts are of incalculable 
importance. 

The effect upon yourself in coming into the 
presence of a cold object is to be chilled. If you 
stay in its presence long enough, and it is big 
enough and cold enough, you will eventually lose 
so much heat that your body will be in a frozen 
state. This heat will have gone out of your body 
and into the cold object. This is the principle 
upon which the refrigerator, the ice-cream freezer, 
and the still bigger artificial ice-machines work. 
Any one who, at sea on a temperate day, has ever 
run into the presence of an iceberg, well knows 
how quickly he gave up — and into the iceberg — 
seemingly every degree of warmth in his body. 

The degree of radiation is inversely as the square 
of the distance ; and this is why in winter we draw 



138 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

especially close to the fire, and why in summer the 
immediate presence of a big ice-box is so refresh- 
ing. In the one case we wish to steal and so 
absorb as much radiated heat as we can, and in the 
latter we wish to give away and ourselves radiate 
as much as we can. In all cases it is the warm 
things of earth that must give up, and it is the 
cold things that are the receivers of this radiated 
wealth. 

To prevent, at times, too rapid and great radia- 
tion on the part of the individual, nature has pro- 
vided such things as non-conductors. The bark of 
a tree is a partial non-conductor of heat, and pre- 
vents in great stress of winter the warm sap of 
the tree from radiating its heat out into the cold 
air, and so, freezing. The feathers upon birds, the 
fur upon animals, protect oftentimes the individual 
in winter from a radiation that might mean its 
actual death. The dead and strewn leaves and 
mould in the forest, are non-conductors and pre- 
vent the warmth in the earth from radiation ; and 
so it often happens that in January, and even on 
snowy days, by scratching down under the leafy 
coverlid you can find tender green things living 
and growing that would die if exposed twenty-four 
hours out in the open. But the most anomalous 
of non-conductors are snow and ice. The farmer 
in the far North and West knows that he will cer- 



RADIATION OF HEAT 1 39 

tainly have a good wheat crop if he can only get 
a permanent winter coverlid for it of snow. 

We are scarcely conscious of the great heat that 
is in our earth, and how much heat it must con- 
stantly radiate, until down in some excavation like 
the Mt. Cenis tunnel we see how the workman's 
limit of heat endurance is measured by minutes, 
and not hours. It is this radiation of earth that 
makes its enveloping stratum of air warm and hab- 
itable by the human race. As one ascends and 
gets farther from the influence of the earth's radia- 
tion the air is felt to be colder, and up at no great 
height science tells us that when clouds form they 
turn into the tiniest and most beautiful of icicles. 

It is a crime to be a cold-hearted, indifferent 
man. One such man often chills a whole com- 
munity. Extend our thought farther toward him ; 
conceive of him, as you have a right to do, as 
being immensely large and well-nigh infinitely cold ; 
then in that state he would freeze and paralyze a 
whole city. Indeed, in the presence of such a 
one, the average human being feels the need of a 
non-conductor like the bark of a tree or the 
feathers of a bird or the leaf mould on the ground. 

The mission of Jesus Christ, as is shown by his 
social life on earth, is to bring about equilibrium 
between men. His greatest and his chief mes- 



140 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

sage as between man and man is, ** Love one 
another/' This is why we find the missionary in 
the slums of our great cities and in the far-away 
portions of the earth. And let me say that if man 
were not such a poor conductor of heat the warmth 
of Christ's heart and the fervor of his life would 
long ago have so warmed mankind's heart that 
there would be to-day perfect equilibrium between 
earth and heaven. 

Then, indeed, if it is only the warm-hearted, 
only the loving, the heat-radiating ones, that do 
God's work in the world — the amount of their 
work individually done being according as is the 
love in their hearts — then, alas ! how often must 
God look down upon this earth, far away from 
him, and see somewhat the same thing that the 
physicist often sees through his telescope high up 
in the air, and far away from earth ; — icicles, and 
icicles alone ! 

XXXII 

FOR THE PROTECTION OF LIFE 

jjEARS ago a young companion and myself 
were out hunting. We were within fifty 
feet of an open wood cleared of under- 
brush. By the merest chance, when looking just 




FOR THE PROTECTION OF LIFE I4I 

within the wood, we saw, near some straggling 
grass, a quail. If we had not been quite small 
boys we would have given the bird a chance for 
his life, and so would have flushed him. But we 
were too young for such high thoughts. In a sec- 
ond there was a report, and we ran to pick up our 
bird ; when lo ! to our amazement, we found not 
one dead quail but seven ! 

Looking back at that event to-day, the only 
notable thing of it all was that a few insignificant 
hillocks of dead grass — though we were almost 
upon them — should have hid and protected, from 
all discovery, six fine birds. They were totally 
invisible, even though, through the incautious ex- 
hibition of himself by one of the covey, our eyes 
were trained upon the spot. 

Throughout my hunting and field-and-wood 
rambling days I kept running across exhibitions of 
this kind. I found that (good mother that she is) 
nature's constant endeavor is to shield and to pro- 
tect and multiply life. No means for her are too 
humble and mean for use. A tussock of grass, a 
clod, a cluster of leaves, a knot-hole in a tree, in 
her hands are converted into safest fortresses, 
behind which a pet child (all unconscious perhaps 
of immediate danger) is ensconced. Not one time 
in a thousand, even though the setter dog be right 
upon them, and though he point directly toward 



142 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

them, does the hunter ever see one till he is 
in air. The animal seems to be aware of his 
safety, and hoping that you may go another way 
waits till your feet are ready to crush him. And 
so I have routed thousands of rabbits, and flushed 
tens of thousands of birds, and have marveled, as 
they sped away, why my eyes had been so dull and 
so inactive, and why I had not discovered them. 
Oftentimes I have looked for ten minutes to find 
a song bird in the tree overhead. And no man 
in a whole country can so successfully hide him- 
self as can a little bird that has gone to roost for 
the night on the limb of a tree. 

The squirrel and many of the bird tribe think 
that the dead limb knot-holes far up in the trees 
were made for their castle homes ; and so they 
were. The decaying hollow log down in the swamp 
may hold, for all you know, an oppossum and all 
her family. And the innocent looking hole under 
the stump may be the home of a snake. 

Nature certainly made all lower animal life to 
fit its environment, and made it especially wdth the 
idea of the preservation of life. It is hard for an 
enemy to distinguish the gray lizard on the old 
rail fence, or a *' devil's horse" or katydid up in 
the green trees, or a bullfrog on a pond's bank, 
or a cricket on the hearth — hard, I say, to distin- 
guish between object and environment. 



FOR THE PROTECTION OF LIFE 1 43 

Going over into the plant-world, there are also 
most interesting evidences of nature's desire to 
preserve and multiply life. Passing by many of 
these in trunk, branch, leaf, and flower, let us come 
directly to the fruit. We note that leaves fall to 
the ground soon after the seed-fruit. The rotting 
of these leaves creates warmth, and under a warm 
covering of leaf humus or mould the seeds sleep 
till spring. And note the protecting coverings of 
all seeds. No knight in his two-foot thick walled 
castle was ever more safe than is a chestnut or a 
chinquapin when in the closed bur. How inde- 
structible is a peach kernel or a hickory nut or a 
black walnut, even when their outer protecting 
coverings are removed ! In all of botany there is 
not a more interesting line of study than the study 
of primary and secondary coverings, or I might 
better say the inner and outer shells of seed germs. 
From the thick cocoanut husk-covering to the 
shell-like coverings of peas and beans, and the 
husks of wheat and corn and oats, and from the 
ebony iron of the cocoanut's inner shell to the 
shell of a tiny cabbage or mustard seed, there is a 
wonder all the way at nature's plan for life pres- 
ervation. 

I feel so assured that nature's creed is that 
"life shall abound and shall continue," that I am 
loath now ever to take life, cither high or low. And 



144 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

I feel always that to break so universal and great a 
law and to destroy even the germ of the tiniest 
life I must have the strongest of justification. 
Nature would not preserve life, if life per se were 
not sacred and holy, and if life did not have a 
right to a continuation of life ! 

To every man is given two lives to keep and 
preserve. Do we select suitable environment 
always and one most conducive to life, and do we 
hedge ourselves about with protections that can 
shield us ? Or are we careless and indifferent 
and so open the gates to the enemy ? 

The scores of wrecked physical lives that one 
daily sees on the streets of a city — whose fault is 
it that they exist ? For every wreck there must 
be a cause, near or remote. That cause, some- 
where and at some time, was indifference to the 
conservation of life. There are not a few w^ho 
seem unconscious that they have a bodily Hfe to 
preserve, until by unlawful pleasures and indul- 
gence they awake some day to find that they have 
forever lost it. And all that they can do is to 
take up and re-echo the cry of Dives in torment. 

We, in all probability, have not the faintest con- 
ception of the preciousness of the life of our souls. 
For how can we yet know the full meaning of 
^* life eternal " and of its bliss and glory and power 



SEDIMENT 145 




and peace. Viewing as we do this universal indif- 
ference to the preservation of the soul's life, the 
sight of the Christ looking down upon and weep- 
ing over Jerusalem, is of all things in the world 
the most natural. 



XXXIII 

SEDIMENT 

jIHERE is such a thing, I am glad to say, in 
nature as chemical purity. Into all of the 
three states of matter — solid, gaseous, 
and liquid — this purity may extend. That there is 
not more of absolute purity in nature is largely 
because all substances of receptive qualities are so 
hedged in by extraneous matter. These foreign 
matters, from the standpoint of the substances 
themselves, are impurities. In the material world, 
most certainly, purity cannot touch impurity with- 
out consequent resultant defilement. 

A goodly proportion of the impurity of running 
water is known as sediment. Sediment may be 
anything which, on account of its heaviness, set- 
tles to the bottom of our medium. It is also 
called lees, grounds, and dregs. It may be dirt, 
mud, trash, and various earthy matters, as washed 
up by the on-flowing waters, as they plough their 



146 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

way through the soil ; or sediment may be any 
substance which having been dissolved, is again 
separated from its solvents and is then thrown to 
the bottom of the vessel — a process known as pre- 
cipitation. In all cases sediment is the impure 
thing, and it falls through inertia by its own 
weight and heaviness and grossness. This is 
God's way of clarifying, by natural causes, all 
the waters of this great earth. 

The commonest example of sediment is to be 
found in those river bottoms that are subject to 
overflow. By means of rain torrents the soil of 
the hills is being carried down to lower levels. 
These varied impurities as fetched down, being 
separated from the main current of our swollen 
stream, spread out and are distributed among the 
quieter outlying waters, and there sink to the 
bottom as sediment. Such soils, built up by suc- 
cessive floods, are known as alluvial soils. The 
ooze and slime of all of our marshes is the product 
of sediment. All lake bottoms show fallen sedi- 
ment, and there are ancient lakes all over the 
globe that have been filled to the brim with sedi- 
ment and so have vanished, and whose sites to-day 
are only known by the character of the soil and 
sediment left behind. And out on the bar, the 
moving current of the river bearing silt, is met by 
the tides of the ocean and so stopped in its out- 



SEDIMENT 147 



ward course — at the bar sediment fairly rains down, 
and its rapid accumulations actually forbid com- 
merce by rendering dangerous or impossible the 
world's navigation. 

Few questions to the scientist are more interest- 
ing than is ocean bottom exploration ; and this too 
is largely a matter of sediment. Near the shore 
are found the coarser deposits from the waters. 
The farther out we go the finer grows the sedi- 
ment ; and finally, far out in the deep depths we 
find in the sea's bottom no record of the shore, 
but only the marly, eroded, and worn remains of 
sea-shells — mostly the shells of minute animals. 

Many water systems of cities that do not own 
filtering plants simply include settling basins, 
whose quiet waters are given days and days in 
which to deposit their sediment before being drawn 
off for drinking purposes. 

And what is daily going on in the waters in the 
matter of sediment is also constantly true of that 
greater body above us of moving fluid — the air or 
atmosphere. Up into this atmosphere the winds, 
upward hot air currents and whirlwinds, are con- 
stantly sending all manner of dust particles from 
earth. Chemical examination of the air at various 
heights show a marvelous amount and curious 
variety of air sediment. These constantly, and 
more or less according to atmospheric conditions, 



148 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

are falling down upon earth's surface. More 
quickly though than by gravity does a heavy rain 
sweep the atmosphere clean of its sediment. 

And there is also sifting at all times through 
the atmosphere, thus constituting it too a sedi- 
ment, what is known as star-dust. Upon the bot- 
tom of mid-ocean star-dust, in no small quantity, 
is to be found to-day, having fallen quietly and 
silently for millions of years out of the skies. 
This is, perhaps, the ashes of burnt-out stars and 
of meteors consumed in our atmosphere through 
friction. There are probably some tons of this 
each year deposited upon our globe. 

What a miscellaneous and heterogeneous mass 
is this dust of our earth ! We find that it is the 
principle of sediment and impurity in all the states 
of matter. We breathe it; we drink it in our water, 
and we eat it in all manner of ways in our food. 

You will always find sediment at the bottom. 
It is the ooze and slime and lees and dregs of all 
the kingdoms. Sediment everywhere is always 
falling to the bottom. In quieter waters it falls 
quickly ; in the rapid current it may be borne out 
to sea, but only to meet its fate at the bar. It 
fills up rivers and streams and inland lakes ; it 
impedes navigation ; and little by little it is filling 
up the depths of old ocean itself. , 



> 



SEDIMENT 149 



That which everywhere makes a thing fall is its 
own sheer weight or inertia. If it were not heavier 
than its medium it would float forever ! Analyze 
sediment in the trodden roadway, in the lower air 
strata, and in the sea, and you will find here the 
lost remnants of things that were once shapely 
and beautiful — dust and ashes, the ground-up 
fragments of rocks, tiny bits of vegetable fibres, 
and even the last and sole evidences and traces 
of a star. 

The great question of to-day, my brother, in 
this day of great problems, is not if we shall cir- 
cumnavigate the air, or send wireless messages 
over and across the waters or straight through 
earth. It is not if we shall talk to Mars ; it is not 
if we shall convert coal directly and without loss 
into energy ; these things are trifles as compared 
with those questions that appertain to that which 
we shall call the dregs and grounds of humanity. 

It is this sediment that fills our jails, our peni- 
tentiaries, and our chain-gangs ; it is this sediment 
that makes the policeman ceaselessly walk his beat ; 
and it is this that puts locks on your door and 
mine, and bars across oyr windows. 

There is study enough down in this sediment 
to interest every sociologist, every humanitarian, 
every Christian, all the days of their lives. Our 
scientists and explorers and mechanical and elec- 



150 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

trical geniuses are peering and prying into every 
dark corner and crook and cranny in nature and 
flooding it with sunshine. But who is giving heed 
to and who is caring, save God and the angels, for 
this teeming under-world of humanity — this '^ sub- 
merged tenth " of our race ? 



XXXIV 

THE CLINGING ONES 

|F all the families to be found in the vege- 
table kingdom the one that appeals most 
to my sympathy and to my heart is that 
of the climbing plants, the clinging ones. Too 
tender and delicate, too attenuated and frail to 
stand up alone and face the battle of life, the 
Creator has given them the disposition and the 
ability to cling to that which is stronger than 
themselves. 

By this adhesion, and cohesion too, I might say, 
the little plant receives untold strength from its 
able life partner. Storms cannot separate them, 
for their bond is well-nigh,indissoluble. They live 
their happy lives together. And many a time have 
we all seen cases when the strong partner having 
died the little plant still clung to it and lovingly 
hid all marks of decay and death by its own beauty 




THE CLINGING ONES I5I 

and by its own fresh green life. The climbing 
plants are nature's own exquisite draperies. They 
repay a thousand-fold everything that befriends 
them. The proudest cathedral of earth feels hon- 
ored and enriched because of the ivy that covers 
it. I have seen the lordliest and sharpest and 
most defiant of mountain crags softened and 
made things of beauty by the vines that clung to 
them and covered them over. I have seen acres 
and acres of tallest, stoutest forest trees wreathed 
to their very tops with a soft green beauty of 
clinging vines that no mortal hand could have 
equaled. 

The tiny sea-weed that covers a wandering sea- 
shell, the moss that covers the stones and the 
roots in our pathway, the trumpet vine that ves- 
tures and hides the ugly stump of the tree that 
was felled, all have their artistic places. How 
without them could nature cover her waste places 
and her own uncouthness and decay ? 

And what marvelous, wondrous means do some 
of this tiny family use in order that they may 
attach themselves to their strong supports ! The 
grapevine uses tendrils as strong as steel that 
enwrap themselves over and over again round 
about the stakes and cross-arms. And the strength 
of three or four men would not suffice to tear this 
grapevine from its support. 



152 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

Some vines wind their whole bodies about their 
supporting friends. Some climb from right to 
left, others from left to right. And no human 
skill can make a vine climb in a direction contrary 
to that taught it by nature. Others have a little 
foot that attaches itself by suction, like the foot of 
a fly. These can climb up perpendicular glass, or 
the smoothest wall. As if one foot were not 
enough, others have several tiny fly feet ; and the 
vine itself will tear and break sooner than these 
will lose their hold. Some have the tiniest root- 
lets that go into and fill up the crevices and thus 
hold fast. Some climb about their protectors in 
such a riotously loving way that we name them 
**love in tangle." 

To climb and to cling is the salvation of all of 
these. If they failed to climb and failed to cling 
they would in their own structural weakness fall 
in the trodden paths and be crushed and lost. But 
in their weakness God gave them means for 
strength and a way of salvation. 

Up higher and in the human world we also find 
weakness. We find tender, shrinking, fragile ones 
who seem without ability to stand by themselves, 
and for themselves to make their way against the 
storms and adverse winds of life. But God has 
not left bereft and comfortless in his kingdom the 



THE CLINGING ONES I 53 

tender and gentler ones. In the tiny arms that 
cHng to its mother's neck the Uttle babe brings to 
its aid the strongest of all human powers — a 
mother's love. The arms of the babe and of older 
children thrown round about and clinging to 
parental love make childhood well-nigh as safe 
and secure as are manhood and womanhood. 

In this self-same way God has pledged all the 
strength and all the power of heaven to the human 
being that clings to him — " Teneo et Teneor^ It 
is not by strength and might, it is not by social 
power and wealth, it is not by wisdom and fame 
that we are to obtain these almighty blessings, it 
is simply by the act of clinging. 

What comfort does this bring to the weak ones, 
the timid ones, the little ones, the uncared-for ones, 
and the bereft ones of earth ! Clinging was made 
for just such as they. They have not the power 
to do aught besides cling. And so it happens 
that the strength and comfort and peace of heaven 
are found more often in lowly hearts than in lordly 
hearts, more often in the hut than in the palace. 

There may be those who think they are strong 
enough of themselves to stand up alone and face 
the duties of life, and after life to look unflinch- 
ingly into the realities of the future ; there may be 
those who would measure their strength with tlic 
strength of God. To these, storms and whirlwinds 



154 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

and cyclones may have to come before they com- 
prehend their own weakness and before they stretch 
out their arms and clasp him who has said to all 
the world : " Come unto Me ! '' 



XXXV 

CHLOROPHYL 



HE structural unit of all life is a tiny cell ; 
farther than this cell you cannot divide 
cellular tissue. These cells may have cell 
walls, or there may be simply a nucleus surround- 
ing its individual mass. The contents of this cell 
is a semi-fluid called protoplasm. Plants manu- 
facture this protoplasm from minerals and from 
the atmosphere, under the influence of sunlight 
and heat. This protoplasm is the primary form 
of life ; it is the physical basis of life. Within 
this cell-protoplasm float tiny granules. They may 
be united, star-shaped, or in chains, or each one 
may be but a rounded particle. They play an 
important part in the food assimilation of the plant. 
In looks these granules are like a waxy pigment. 
This pigment, itself a mixture of yellow and blue 
colors, is always green in appearance. It is the 
formation of this pigment, in all plant-cells each 
spring, that makes that verdure which greets our 



CHLOROPHYL I 5 5 



eye in the field and forest and over hill and dale to 
farthest horizon. Not only to the presence of this 
pigment does each leaf and stem and blade owe 
its greenness, but some of the lower animals owe 
their color also to a similar pigment. 

This green coloring-matter cannot be developed 
except under the action of light and heat. Under 
the influence partly of cold this green pigment is 
broken up and dissipated and changed within the 
fluid-protoplasm, and lo ! we have the whiteness 
and that seeming death that are incident to winter. 
The gardener, when he banks up his celery and 
ties up his lettuce leaves, banishes the sunlight and 
so dissipates the chlorophyl, and so produces these 
blanched and whitened vegetables. To tear away 
the earth in the one case, and to untie the leaves in 
the other, would bring back the chlorophyl in the 
leaves and stems of both plants. 

Where plants languish under disease they are 
always pale through loss of chlorophyl. Within 
the cool dark shadows of your living-rooms most 
plants will soon languish, whiten, and die. As 
between the lower and higher types of plant life, 
there are wide variations of chlorophyl distribu- 
tion. The lowly mushroom is destitute wholly of 
green herbage. The upper sides of all leaves, 
and this is the most important side of a leaf, 
contain in their cells far more green pigment than 



IS6 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

is contained in the cells in the under side of the 
leaf. The upper side is therefore the greener. 
The older the leaf — till the autumn tints appear — 
and the longer it has been exposed to sunlight the 
deeper the green of its leaf, while young leaves 
look almost white. 

There is an infinite contrast in the shadings of 
green in trees and plants. No two seem alike. 
To each plant type nature makes a specific assign- 
ment per cell of chlorophyl. As a metal is known 
by the color of its spectrum, so in a healthy plant 
you might almost discover and individualize the 
plant, if you only knew the amount of chlorophyl, 
and its shape, within one single cell of its leaf or 
stem. 

Than green there is no other color so pleasing 
to the eye. I believe the world would grow mad, 
and there certainly would be continual pain of eye- 
sight, if all of our living green w^ere changed to 
yellow or red. To look out upon nature's greens 
brings ever deepest rest and refreshment. 

To put life into death, to put this saving green 
into whiteness, this is the part and work of chloro- 
phyl. A plant cell is a tiny thing, — the tiniest liv- 
ing structure in all of God's material kingdom, — 
but through the advent each spring of chlorophyl 
into the infinite cells of all plant life this great 
earth, from cold white and wintry death, is trans- 



CHLOROPHYL 1 5/ 



formed into an Eden meant by God to be a type 
of that paradise where angels ever and evermore 
dwell. 

There is in the human being that which is akin 
to chlorophyl — we call it love. It can be devel- 
oped, or it can, by the lack of sunshine and warmth, 
be made to grow pale and sickly and cold, and so 
be made to die. 

What else in the world is so wonderful as is this 
love-chlorophyl ? What else so puts strength into 
the arm of weakness ? What else so fills the world 
with brave-hearted men and women ? What else 
is so potent to make men risk their lives, aye, to 
give up their lives ? 

We never tire of beholding love's works, whether 
it be in storied page or in whatever place wherein 
men toil and strive and dare and suffer and do 
brave deeds. 

Put love into every protoplasmic cell of }^our 
life. How beautiful is the green palm in the 
desert, or how beautiful, winter gone, is the 
green of the grass, the shrub, or the tree ! 

Heaven is a place of eternal sunshine and 
warmth. No shadow and no cold is there, as on 
earth, to dissipate chlorophyl. Every prospect 
there forever pleases the eye. And there the 
heart will do and dare with a courageous strength 



IS8 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

unthought of on earth. And love there will not 
pale and grow cold, nor will love there ever die. 
In every protoplasmic cell in heaven chlorophyl is 
irrevocably, unchangeably, eternally fixed. 



XXXVI 

THE WARPING OF TIMBER 



SAPLING is a young tree, and full of 
sap. No one would ever think of making 
lumber out of a sapling. The pity is 
that there are old trees that never get out of the 
sappy stage, and the lumberman wonders why 
such trees were ever made. Along most of our 
great rivers are wide stretches of forest. The 
timber in them, surcharged with water, grows to 
immense size. You might think this would be the 
saw-mill's paradise. But kiln-dry such wood as 
much as you can, and beams, rafters, planks, 
boards, etc., made of it will, if used, crawl, shrink, 
and warp. You might say that the durable cy- 
press shingle is an exception, since it is so largel}^ 
used. As a matter of fact, this shingle warps 
more than pine, and it takes two nails to prevent 
warping to the pine shingle's one. 

An architect would not dare specify other than 
heart lumber and kiln-dried. He might go farther, 



THE WARPING OF TIMBER I 59 

and specify that it be winter-cut (in the forest) 
and two years dried. 

It is the tree's heart — drier, denser, closer- 
grained, and of harder wood — that the sawyer in 
the mill is getting after as he mercilessly tears 
away the surrounding and outside green boards, 
soft, soggy, and full of sap, and so puts them in 
the trash pile. 

Warping is the unequal contraction, through 
drying out by heat, of wood. A log, a scantling, a 
board, on the ground, will crawl, creep, crack, curl 
up at the ends toward the sun, and do all sorts of 
funny things. Its top surface, it is plain to see, 
has more heat applied to it than has the cool, 
damp bottom surface. 

In a kiln a gentle heat is applied equally to all 
parts of the timber — no two parts of which touch 
— and so the drying out process is equal on all 
sides. 

To prevent columns for pillars from cracking, 
as they so often do, the lumber people bore out 
the heart of the log, in order that contraction may 
be equal inside and outside. 

Lumber, in a lumber yard, is always piled high 
in piles. This is not to save room. It is to save 
warp. As it is, the few top boards will always 
curl up, warp, and split. The lumberman, by the 
way, in fixing his pile, lays sticks between the 



l6o NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

planks ; they would not dry if they touched, more- 
over they would get the ''blues." I cannot say 
whether this ''blues," so prevalent in lumber, is a 
fungus growth or a chemical change in the sap. 
But it permeates the wood, and you cannot saw or 
shave it out. It stains to the heart. 

One of the purposes of paint, shellac, wood fill- 
ers, hard oils, and varnishes, is to prevent warp by 
preventing the entrance or exit of water or sap. 
The hard woods, and free of sap and warp, are 
daily becoming more sought after and dearer. The 
cabinet maker, the house builder, the car builder, 
the bridge builder, and all other wood artisans 
who have a care for their reputations, will only use 
those woods that will stand the wear and tear of 
heat, cold, and damp, and indeed all the stresses 
of varied weather. 

It is worth while in buying a house, or even a 
bit of furniture, to have a care that you get just 
the right kind of wood. For a drawer, a pillar, a 
door, a window, or a wall, once warped, is out of 
plumb forever. No carpenter can renovate it and 
keep the same wood. Like men with rheum.atism, 
warped woods are always worse in a *Mvet spell." 
In many a home, a few damp days will lock up, as 
with a key, every drawer in cabinet or bureau. 

Unfit for lumber and unfit even to burn for fire- 
wood, one is apt to wonder why in nature's econ- 



THE WARPING OF TIMBER l6l 

omy sappy and easily warped woods were ever 
made. 

No one expects children to be capable of con- 
secutive and consistent thought and work. We 
expect them to fly off at all sorts of tangents, and 
to be full of vagaries. Their minds and spirits are 
not mature nor by any means developed. They 
are in the sappy stage of life — indeed are saplings, 
and need a world of growth of grain. While we 
hope for each one that his out-turn may be like 
that of red wood or hickory or oak or mahogany 
or teak tree in the forest, yet we know that many 
will be sap heads and will remain silly all their 
lives, and be therefore of as little use as are the 
swamp trees, that never lose, even by fire, their 
sap. Such people take on a new warp more often 
than the moon changes, and the man who tries to 
build edifices with them will have a condemned 
house on his hands. 

And the man who is full of prejudices and whims, 
the cranky man, and the man who goes round 
pluming himself on his eccentricities, these too, 
all have cases of the '* warps," which is unequal 
expansion. The heart is as easily warped as is the 
brain, and unless these two at all times expand co- 
equally, the result is surely a warp. The univer- 
sity is not exempt, neither is the pulpit. The pews 

L 



1 62 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

are full of it. The religious crank is no less a 
crank and a warp because he is a church-member 
and thinks he is doing right. 

The sap will never get out of the world till the 
millennium comes. The spiritual lumberman in 
the next world, where all the timber is hard grained 
from center to circumference and without sappy 
conditions, will think that he indeed and in truth is 
in paradise. 

XXXVII 

DORMANTS 

USPENDED animation, or an apparent 
suspension of vital action, in an object 
which, for the time being, seems neither 
dead or alive, is one of the most interesting of all 
phenomena in animal or plant life. 

The withdrawal of necessary stimuli often 
causes this condition. Seeds, deprived of moist- 
ure and air, have been known to preserve their 
germinative power hundreds of years. Certain 
fishes in Ceylon bury themselves in the mud in 
the dry season and return to active life when the 
rain comes. Certain animalcules, deprived of 
moisture, become dry and remain dormant indefi- 
nitely until revived by moisture. Diminution in 




iDORMANTS 1 63 



temperature v^ill induce this phenomenon. Cold- 
blooded animals can stand almost any amount of 
cold. Frozen fishes have been often taken from 
water and revived. Frogs and snails have been 
kept in an ice-house three years, and yet have not 
died. Warm-blooded animals, on the contrary, 
when subjected to suspension of vital activities die. 

But these things are not half so interesting as 
is the phenomenon of hibernation (going into 
winter quarters), so common in a goodly number 
of cold-blooded animals in cold climates. (Down 
in the tropics certain animals have their season of 
lethargy or deep sleep in the summer time.) Such 
animals as bears, bats, badgers, hedgehogs, liz- 
ards, snakes, land-snails, eels, mussels, and many 
insects hibernate. All country boys know a great 
deal about the annual sleep and awakening of the 
dormants. Looked at from a lazy man's stand- 
point, it is not so bad a condition. There is 
nothing to be done except to curl up and sleep ; 
no eating of food, nor drinking of water ; no walk- 
ing about ; no worry and no fretting. 

This condition is not confined to animal life. 
The trees of the forest, bereft of foliage, stand 
practically dormant in winter. A large number of 
plants with bulbous, fleshy roots die down, so far 
as their tops are concerned, when the fall comes, 
putting out new shoots in the spring. Of course, 



164 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

though, the great hosts of plants are like the 
warm-blooded animals, and actually die so soon as 
there comes any practical suspension of vital ac- 
tions. 

By far the most important phenomenon con- 
nected with the dormant state is the decreased 
respiration. In all cases where there is normal 
or rapid respiration in animals or through foliage 
of plants or leaves of trees, there must be con- 
stant feeding to take the place of the waste prod- 
ucts given out through the breath. The respira- 
tion of the dormants in a dormant state is so in- 
significant that one may be immersed in water or 
poisonous gas for quite a while and not die. 

Now here is an interesting law by which nature 
seems to keep up a certain equilibrium : by as 
much at any time as is respiration decreased, by 
so much is nervous irritability increased. The 
dormant, when cold weather comes, will creep off 
into holes and crannies, etc. The general belief 
is that they do it to keep warm ; but they do it 
largely that they may not be disturbed. This pre- 
caution is necessary, for it is an easy matter to 
kill an animal hibernating by arousing him and 
worrying him a bit. Being already in a highly ner- 
vous, irritable state, a slight increase of this con- 
dition (an over-stimulant) often kills. 

An interesting phenomenon among animals of 



DORM ANTS I 65 



habitual low respiration (dormants) showing high 
nervous irritability is their long-continued muscu- 
lar twitching after being killed. 

A parallel to the above is not hard to find. I 
refer to that great host of human beings in whose 
spiritual and mental lives there is almost a total 
absence of activities. I do not refer especially to 
the serious and flagrant law-breakers, but to that 
large class of men who do not grasp opportuni- 
ties, or make use of advantages, or who do not 
use their gifts as they might. 

There are sleepers in the Church and in the 
State, on the farm, and in business offices, and 
also in the professions. There are sleepers among 
those to whom has been given great wealth, and 
there are sleepers just as dormant down in the 
humble cottages. Nature is kind to her dormants 
in holes and nooks and crannies. In the spring- 
she calls them, and every one comes at her bid- 
ding. But who or what shall awake our human 
dormants and call them to life's full activities and 
responsibilities ? 

The very best men have lapses. Fortunate is 
that man who before it is too late, awakens to 
duty. And happy should be that man who, by 
appeal or example arouses one single soul out of 
its lethargy. 



1 66 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

It is a strange fact also that among the human 
dormants those of slowest moral respiration show 
highest nerve irritability. I know a man who is a 
murderer, a drunkard, and gambler, and who all 
of his life has been a tough and a lover of fights 
and quarrels. And yet that man said to me lately : 
*' I don't see why some people seem to dislike me. 
I never wronged them. I love peace. I never 
injured any man in my life." What extreme 
hyper-sensitiveness of epidermis did this tough 
show ! The worst gamblers and blacklegs of any 
city are the ones who make the most posi- 
tive and most frequent assertions that they are 
^^ gentlemen." 

Make the most remote reflection upon the in- 
tegrity of a Western plain bully, and he will plug 
you with a bullet. Nothing less than a wise man 
can receive reproof. Nothing less than a saint 
can say, " I am the chief among sinners." 

XXXVIII 

WINGS 



^ggjIOME years ago, in Switzerland, I stood on 
^Sm a precipice of an Alpine mountain. There 
""""^ was before me a sheer declivity of three 
thousand feet. And though I stood some twenty 



WINGS 167 



feet away from the brink, yet when I looked down 
into that awful chasm, I felt my whole frame a- 
tremble. All at once a little bird, just ahead of 
me, flew off the mountain. He played in the air, 
and then in wide circles climbed higher heaven- 
ward. I do not know if he was unconscious of 
the great distance beneath himself, or if his mount- 
ing higher and higher was done to exhibit his fear- 
lessness and to show his absolute disdain of earth. 
As he left the mountain-side, I involuntarily put 
out my hands, thinking to stay him, fearing that 
he would fall and be dashed to pieces. But in a 
moment I was laughing at myself as I said, '* Why, 
he has wings ! " 

Wings are those agencies by which a body can 
raise itself in air and sustain itself there, or move 
forward in any direction. Science stands helpless 
and without explanation, as she views all of na- 
ture's winged bodies. Man's best steam or electric 
cars or bicycles fade into utter nothingness beside 
the simple flight of a bird, a bee, or any one of 
the tiniest insects that fly in the air. 

Wings have little place in the city. They need 
airy space, they court the illimitable ether. Go 
out in the fields some day, you who live in the 
country, and watch for an hour the ten thousand 
wings about you. See the buzzard, far up in 
serenest heights, sailing through the livelong day 



1 68 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

without perceptible motion. See the dove's rapid 
flight, the see-saw flight of the woodpecker, the 
fluttering flight of the field lark, the noisy flight of 
the partridge, and the short, twittering flight of the 
field sparrow. Watch the flight of the myriad of 
butterflies, all robed in bright array ! Watch the 
buzzing flight of the grasshopper host that spring 
up at your feet ! Watch the quick, straight-lined 
flight of the bee, so full of business and honey. 
Watch the flight of the fiery wasps and hornets 
and of the peppery yellow-jackets and of that blun- 
dering blunderbuss, a bumble bee. Watch the 
flight of thousands of tiny insects in the air about 
you, the motion of whose wings no human eye has 
ever discovered. 

Look close about you a-field, and you will see 
that even the things we call inanimate have wings. 
Watch the wings that all the thistle tribe put upon 
the seeds that they bear. Watch the flying cat- 
tails in the swamp, or the broom-sedge on the 
moor's edge. Examine all the seeds of light 
weight, and see to how many of them God has 
given feathery wings that bear them hither and 
thither. 

And how tireless those wings are. A bird's 
wing-muscles are a hundred times proportionately 
stronger than are the arm muscles of the strongest 
man. Look at a swallow's wing and you will find 



WINGS 169 



that it covers almost as much flat surface as does 
the foot of a one hundred and seventy-five pound 
man. Put that swallow, that verily lives in the 
air, in his ethereal element ; watch him sailing, 
circling, and dashing with many circumvolutions 
through all the happy day ; he seeks his nest at 
sundown, after his one thousand miles of aerial 
travel, not because of weariness, but only because 
night has come ! 

When out in mid-ocean, one thousand five hun- 
dred miles from land, when the water is more dull 
and dreary and lifeless than the Sahara Desert, how 
refreshing to see the little stormy petrel skimming 
along the pavement of the sea ! On shipboard, 
one wonders as he sees him flying and flying and 
ever flying in that wildest, loneliest, and most dan- 
gerous of places, one wonders, I say, at the tireless 
power that lies in those tiny wings ! 

And the beauty of wings ! Did you ever look 
at the colors on a dragon-fly's wings, and espe- 
cially upon the wings down in the swamps of those 
fellows whom children call " snake doctors " ? 

And butterfly wings ! Did you know that a 
butterfly's wings are made up of a host of minute, 
colorless, overlapping scales, and that the color of 
the wings is caused by the interference of rays 
of light along the edge of the scales, precisely as 
are made the colors in mother-of-pearl ? The most 



170 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

wonderful sight I saw at the Philadelphia Centen- 
nial were the wings^ through a microscope, of the 
coleopte7'a^ or hard-backed bugs from Brazil. It 
did seem to me that a whole aurora borealis had 
been emblazoned on the back of the bug ! And I 
thought then that if God had stooped and painted 
with such care all the colors and shades of his rain- 
bow upon a bug's back, I would never more call 
anything of his lowly or mean or insignificant. 

You and I live in a world that is heavy and 
earthy. The force of gravity bears everything 
downward. There is sorrow here and grief and 
poverty and there are tears. There is loneliness 
here and sickness and despair. But as wings can 
bear us up against gravity, so can wings bear us 
up against grief and tears. We cannot always 
actually see these wings that bear us up ; yet the 
most and the best and the most real of the things 
in this universe are things we cannot see. We 
cannot see the wings of prayer, the wings of 
faith, the wings of thought, the wings of light, the 
wings of the wind ; but they are there. 

You never gave a barrel of flour, a ton of coal, 
a warm garment, a word of sympathy or of hope ; 
you never brushed away a tear or smoothed out a 
wrinkle, but that you were giving to some one 
wings that bore him up above his sufferings. The 



NATURES VOICES I7I 

angels of heaven are not the only angels, and their 
wings ** with healing in them '' are not the only 
wings. Kind hearts can make everything about 
them grow wings. The doing of good bears no 
relationship to social position. The coleopteran^ 
with the aurora borealis on his wings, is the bug 
under our feet ! 



XXXIX 

nature's voices 

^ATURE is audibly speaking all the while. 
If our ear were sufficiently delicate, we 
could place it to the ground and hear 
the gigantic monotone rumblings proceeding from 
millions of sources within a never-quiet earth ; we 
could hear the rumblings of distant trains and 
wagons and footfalls on its surface ; we could hear 
the roots of the trees creaking down beneath the 
soil ; we could hear the song of the grass as it 
grows, and the song of the growing corn in yonder 
field, and the song voices of the ants in the dust, 
and of the crickets, and of all tiny creeping- 
things. 

I would not dare say that God in the beginning 
made one thing in all creation that was dumb and 
could not sing, if it chose, its own song of glad- 




1/2 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

ness and of thanksgiving. And though some of 
these songs may pass your and my finite ears in 
their upward passage into the great resonance 
chambers of heaven, yet God there surely gathers 
them up, as I beheve, in great consonant anthems, 
and from his high throne answers back the sing- 
ers. 

Few things in nature can sing more songs than 
can the wind, each song and keynote being in- 
dicative of its mood and spirit at that particular 
time. The most terrific note I ever heard was the 
fierce, shrill, titanic shriek of a cyclone, not two 
hundred yards away from me. All of that even- 
ing thereafter the clouds dashed hither and thither 
without aim or drift ; the wind came and went in 
gusts from every quarter, and all the night long I 
heard it, moaning and moaning as if it were some 
human being crying for the harm he had done. 

There are few things of greater interest than 
to go out into the open, and there, listening at 
every sound-voice that you hear, argue back to the 
quality of the spirit that inspired the note. Have 
you ever heard the storm-waves beating and burst- 
ing in their rage upon the shore ? And on a clear, 
calm day have you heard the waves lapping so 
gently and quietly upon the self-same shore that 
their sound w^ould not awaken a sleeping child ? 
The roar of a Niagara has a different keynote 



NATURES VOICES I 73 



too, from the little brook as it sings and plays 
with the pebbles and stones that lie in its current. 
The coo of a dove, the bright song of a canary, 
or the hungry cry of a hawk, or the uncanny hoot 
of an owl at night, these all indicate the varied 
tempers or spirits of the birds in question. A 
dog's note when he is on the trail, or when he is 
at bay, or when he notes the approach of his 
master, or when he is engaged in a rough and 
tumble fight, no two are at all alike. What a 
study of keynotes would one have, if he could 
live a month in some strong, safe, iron cage in 
the center of some unexplored forest of Central 
Africa, or jungle of East India, full of all manner 
of wild and ferocious animal life. While our ears 
are not attuned so that we can distinguish the 
varied accents and notes of the same cricket in 
the grass, or cicada in the tree, or the various 
notes of all the insect hosts, yet with many of them 
we can get enough of their general voice-tone to 
arrive at the spirit-trend of the little animal. 

Voice in nature is everywhere the expression of, 
or utterance of, soul. Voice is dual ; the inner 
sentiments and outward expressions are one and 
the same. Nature everywhere and at all times is 
giving utterance, and all utterance is according to 
the above law. 

There is no such thing as noise, in its generally 



174 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

accepted sense ; for noise is chaos, which is a 
senseless thing. All noise rather, is voice, and all 
voices are full of meaning. It is easy enough to 
look upon all nature about us as being a dumb, 
dead, material, unmeaning thing. But heaven did 
not so intend it. Heaven never made a dead 
thing. It is part of the record that the flaming 
stars and all the material spheres in the zenith 
sing as they roll in their orbits. 

Nature is talking, talking, singing, singing, to 
all the world and all the time. Each voice has its 
own spirit, and to him that hath ears that hear, 
the realm of nature all about him is as full of 
spirits as are the realms beyond the stars. 

That soul of yours is talking, talking, singing, 
singing, to all the world and all the time. It could 
not be voiceless if it would. More than you or I 
think does the very keynote or pitch of your daily 
voice, to say nothing of its rhythm and metre and 
accent and emphasis, indicate the quality of your 
soul. 

The voices of cyclones and cataracts and boom- 
ing surf and hungry hawks and roaring lion and 
snarling jaguar, these all have their counterparts 
in the human voice, and in each voice we see the 
audible photograph of a soul. 

" Peace and good will " the angels' sang. And 



COMPENSATION 1 75 



they sang it on earth. And God for this earth 
meant that after that night there should never be 
uttered by mortal man a note more harsh and 
cruel and fierce and selfish and shrill than this. 
The keynote of the angels' voices was to be the 
keynote of all humanity ; and the human soul 
from which the human song came was to be as 
sweet and pure and gentle as that of the angel. 

Nothing can come into heaven that defiles it ; 
and so it is that no harsh and cruel notes of yours 
and mine can ever come up into heaven's resonance 
chamber where is gathered, for angel and redeemed, 
the sweetest music from all the worlds. But if 
God were to bend down his ear to earth's level 
and listen, and if voice is dual and is the expres- 
sion of a soul, then what a poor opinion must his 
analysis give him of some men's souls ! 

XL 

COMPENSATION 



HE more a man knows of the underworld 
life the less boastful and less disdainful 
he becomes. God in creation seems to 
have left no life comfortless and bereft. Wherever 
certain powers seem to be lacking in any one 
creation, one has only to examine closely to find 



lyG NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

Other powers developed to an exceeding high 
degree. It is only the ignorant man that to-day, 
putting his foot upon the life under him, can call 
any part of it unclean and mean and ignoble. 

I have been awakened many a morning at the 
crack of day by a whirr and a whirl and by a cack- 
ling song, and I knew that my house lodger, the 
chimney swift, had started on his merry rounds 
for the da}^ 

My eye has followed him hour after hour, wheel- 
ing and circling and chattering, far up in the glo- 
rious sunlight in the empyrean blue. Did he tire } 
Did he faint or fall } What man in all earth 
could do for one moment what that tiny bird does 
through the livelong day } Not more wonderful 
in all animal life is that power of the dog by which 
he can discover in the crowded street the direction 
in which his master went, or can detect far out 
afield and at a great distance the presence of game. 

No less a one than our Lord, in no less a book 
than the Bible, has contrasted for man the beau- 
teous garments with which the lily of the valley 
is arrayed. Wherever we turn, wherever we look, 
man can find a wonder and a marvel in all the life 
about him, and see gifts which nature did not see 
fit to endow him with. The more we look into 
creation the more does it seem that God's plan 
is one everywhere of divine compensation. 



COMPENSATION 1 77 



The most pitifully helpless thing in all of human 
life is an orphan child. But turn with me into the 
insect world. We find at its threshold this fact, 
that nearly every insect is born into the world an 
orphan. Do they die ? Break into a little clay 
house stuck to the wall, break into any of the cu- 
rious closed-tight cells of many kinds where are 
insect eggs. The larvae when born find food just 
at hand, left by a careful mother. Or the egg 
may have been left somewhere in a sweet nut, or 
a peach, or a grain of corn, or on a cabbage leaf, 
no matter where. Wherever the grub is born he 
finds food to be had for the eating. And he 
lustily lays to at once and without coddling or 
formality. 

Now if the theory of compensation be true, then 
the lower you go in the scale of life the more 
wonderful should be the compensation that we 
find. The lowest thing, perhaps, in plant life is 
the lichen. You have seen them all your life — 
flat, leathery growths, mostly on barks and fences 
and rocks. Yet this is the most widely diffused 
plant in nature. Some of them love the moist 
bark of trees, and some kinds love the smooth, 
dry bark. Some love the wet rocks, while some 
love dry rocks. Some love the rocks and sands 
of the hottest desert. Some love the coldest 
climates, as do the Iceland moss which we eat, 

M 



178 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

and the reindeer moss, on which reindeers largely 
live. Some kinds love a granite rock, while 
others cling to limestone, and still others to sand- 
stone, while there are some kinds which spread 
themselves at once over the freshly cooled lava 
from a crater's mouth. They show all colors and 
perform faithfully their own simple work, for the 
gray and green and yellow and brown and silver 
and gold patches of lichens on the rocks were not 
put there only to cover nakedness and barrenness 
with color and beauty. The roots of the rock 
lichens go down into the tiniest crevices and the 
plants cover the hard surface ; these attract and 
gather the moisture of the air or rain and hold 
it there. And then begin through their united 
agency the silent disintegration of the mighty 
rocks which are to furnish with fresh soil this 
great, wide world. 

But there is seemingly another and very won- 
derful compensation given to this lowliest plant, 
and its parallel is perhaps not to be found in 
mortal life. The strange thing is that this lowly 
plant should show such marvelous vitality, so 
much and exceeding great life. You may keep a 
specimen in a dry place in your house for a year 
and then put it out in the moist air, and it will 
relax and begin again all the functions of its life. 
The vitality of the lichen is such that it is believed 



COMPENSATION 1/9 



that it would live, if unmolested, ages upon ages — 
thousands and thousands of years. Indeed, the 
great botanist, Fries, is quoted as saying that 
^' the life of lichens bears in itself no cause of death, 
and is only to be ended by external circum- 
stances." 

Think of this tiny, lowly plant, O boastful man, 
that seems to have been given the power within 
itself of living, if undisturbed, till the trumpet 
sound on the last great day. 

Where in all nature can you find kinder and 
greater compensation ? 

The New Testament does not abound in com- 
mands. But in it is to be found one dreadful 
warning that we are not to judge our neighbors. 
Perhaps a reason is to be found just here in this 
theory of compensation. Perhaps your neighbor 
may have his shortcomings, as you think. But 
perhaps if you knew your neighbor better, knew 
him as God and the angels know him, and knew 
of some exquisite divine compensation that God 
had given to him especially, then in place of judg- 
ment you would be glad to fall in the dust at his 
feet and do him reverence. 

God has not left his people bereft and comfort- 
less. Whatever the short-lived gifts of earth may 
be, God's gifts to his children lie along the lines 



i80 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

of the immortal and the eternal. Even the gift 
that seems temporal, in God's hands shows eternal 
uses and purposes. O lowly men and women of 
earth, seemingly shut out from power and wealth 
and social position, go search, and you will find 
that which will be for you God's glorious com- 
pensations. 

O men and women of earth who though in the 
following of Him may have to forsake some ways 
that look pleasant to your eyes, yet it were better 
to search and find him out who, pointing to a new 
way, holds in his hands divinest compensations — 
the riches of truth and life. 



XLI 

STRENGTH IN CALMNESS 

ilHEN the world's artists have wanted a 
study of tranquillity, calmness, and peace, 
they have always sought out nature ; and 
for this study they have painted and photographed 
it in unnumbered ways and times. Whenever the 
artist has looked out upon its natural self, and not 
its unnatural, the pictured face of Buddha himself 
could not show more of calmness than our artist 
finds in the face of nature. Sometimes upon a 
quiet afternoon as I have looked upon a forest, or 




STRENGTH IN CALMNESS l8l 

a harvest field, or an emerald meadow, the thought 
in my mind has been of even more than that calm- 
ness — it has been almost that of repose and sleep. 

See how quietly the spring comes on ; not a 
bugle note is sounded ; there is no impressment of 
railroad trains and steamer transports ; there is no 
massing at great cost of immense trains of quarter- 
master's stores, there are no drill sergeants nor 
daily drills nor large staff of commissioned offi- 
cers ; and yet all the armies of the world, from the 
beginning till now, would not compare in numbers 
with the recruits of leaf and flower and blade that 
fall into ranks with each incoming spring, on tree 
and vine and bush as found in one single forest. 
If in all this marshaling of numbers there is ever 
one single command given, it is in a still, small 
voice too low for human ear to catch. 

In all of human endeavor and struggle, there is 
nothing to compare in strength with spring's vital 
force. We have often seen in the garden a little 
bean or pea stalk just coming up, raise a clod 
of five hundred times its weight. I have seen 
a thing as soft as a mushroom raise a heavy 
stone ; and it is on record that three mushrooms 
have lifted an eighty pound stone. Scientists have 
harnessed a growing squash fruit, and it has burst 
the harness and gone on growing. It is said indeed, 
that a squash's force of expansion is five thousand 



1 82 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

pounds. Now multiply the power of expansion, 
in all the fruits and flowers and stems and leaves, 
by their own infinite numbers as seen each spring 
and summer in forest and field and garden, and 
we would find our mathematics swallowed up in 
the figures that would note the result. This re- 
sult would show the force expended by spring in 
order to give this vernal loveliness which every- 
where greets our eye, and would show the power 
put forth by her in order to fill the world's gran- 
aries with food. 

The quietness with which all of this is done, I 
say, is the world's greatest marvel ; and yet if it 
were done in any other than in a tranquil, calm, 
and quiet way, there would be danger in the re- 
sult. For whenever one hears noise in nature, he 
is apt to find that there has been a clash in some 
of its laws. We will find perhaps a titanic strug- 
gle between opposing forces and consequent de- 
struction and maybe death. The shriek of the 
cyclone, the crash of thunder, the roar of the 
storm, and the boom of the breakers off shore, 
these all speak with loud and startling tones ; and 
they are the tones of fury and of gigantic brute 
force, as inimical to all the quiet work of nature as 
they are to humanity and its work. And yet these 
terrific sounds are almost the only loud sounds 
known in nature. 



STRENGTH IN CALMNESS 183 

For the fret and worry and turmoil so incidental 
to the business life of to-day, there is no better 
antidote than the placid calm found in the country. 
I have never known a merchant, grown tired of 
the strain of business, but who hoped at some time 
to be able to quit the city. The medical profes- 
sion long ago found out the tonic that is to be 
found in the country, and it yearly sends there a 
great host of weary, nervous, and weak persons, 
to get strong and healthy once more. 

At all points we see that calmness is necessary 
for strength ; strength for initial growing and 
strength also for recovery. The noise that passion 
and madness give vent to, in human life, shows a 
clash of opposing forces. In the pathway of pas- 
sion is destruction that oftentimes is equally fatal 
to both combatants. The ancients rightly defined 
anger to be nothing less than a short madness. 
Constructively considered, passion, ferment, and 
fury are always weakness. 

Calmness is necessary if one wishes to retain his 
full nervous bodily strength. He who would win 
his point and gain his case in whatever struggle 
he may contend, must hold fast ever to calmness. 
Noise and frenzy and passion we expect in the 
savage. The farther removed the man from the 
savage, the more even and smooth and calm and 
temperate should be the quality of his life. 



1 84 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

Just why a cataleptic fit or its equivalent should 
be the necessary concomitant of the dawning of 
the religious life in a man, I cannot see. I can 
conceive of better Christians than the howling 
dervishes ! The mind should be the balance 
wheel of the heart. I can understand why a 
Christian's heart should be especially exuberant, 
but there is then all the greater reason why his 
mind should be one especially wise and compre- 
hensive and calm. 

We want to grow in our religious life ; we want 
to make the most out of it and do the most that 
is possible in it. For all of this we must, unless 
my parallel fails me, have calmness and serenity 
and quietness of mind of life and soul. 

XLII 

, BARRIERS 

|HERE are many things and conditions in 
the plant world that are of intense in- 
terest to the Christian socialist. Down 
there, there are four great gifts that are absolutely 
free to their dwellers. There is this broad land, 
whether it be on level plain, or sunny hilltop, or in 
rich valley. It is theirs to choose from, and it is 
theirs to flourish in and to bring forth fruit in. 




BARRIERS I 8 = 



And all air, water, food, wherever found by them, 
are likewise free. God gave them these things, and 
he holds the titles for them against all marauders 
and thieves. 

The conditions down there remind me of the 
kind of a heaven which George Macdonald has 
pictured, viz, a place where everything is abso- 
lutely free — where every man produces those 
things he is best fitted for and loves best to do, 
and where the product of his toil is freely given 
to all others, just as the product of their toil is 
given to him. If we say that this picture or 
vision is strictly supernal, then we must admit 
that this lower vegetable kingdom beneath us con- 
forms more closely to celestial types than does 
this lauded lordly kingdom of our own. 

Besides these free things which are theirs by 
simple appropriation, I find also down there no 
impediments in the matter of environment. There 
are no barriers set up. No plant says to another, 
" I am holier, wiser, better born, more useful, 
more beautiful, than you." There are many that 
might claim royal succession, many that might 
claim membership in the Mayflower Descendants 
and Colonial Dames and Daughters of Confeder- 
ate Officers' societies, but you would fail to find 
any of their autographs in any of these records. 
The grand oak and the scrubby old field pine grow 



1 86 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

up side by side and all through life lovingly touch 
elbows. No shrub or brush or tree ever cast off 
the tender vine that clung to and grew about it. 
No rosebush ever said even to a nettle as they 
grew up one beside the other, ''Go away, depart 
from me, you hurtful, stinging thing." No holly, 
or cedar, or magnolia tree ever said to its tiniest 
neighbor annual, ^* Stand you afar from me, for I 
belong to the evergreen — the immortal among 
plants.'' 

The blessedest, best picture of peace and good- 
will in all this green earth is down in the warm, 
damp, rich jungle where plant life consumes the 
time in absolutely riotous living. But everywhere 
there is happiness and joy, everywhere they meet 
and clasp hands, which is the seal of universal 
brotherhood. 

Nature never makes a barrier. The rivers are 
simply highways to the sea, and the seas are the 
world's easy highways for universal free commerce. 
The mountains are simply places of elevation on 
whose tops are the purest air and the most abun- 
dant sunshine ; and the tallest mountain-tops are 
simply places of earth, around which heaven can 
safely place her eternal snow mantles — white be- 
cause they nestle up so close to the throne. 

And he who loves nature and sits at her feet, 
and yet has not learned freedom and companion- 



BARRIERS 187 

ship, and who has not learned to hate shackles 
and barriers — then he has not read in the sunlight 
and aright her meaningful lessons. 

What pitiful barriers poor humanity is con- 
stantly setting up ! Pitiful because they are un- 
worthy, and because they shall be broken down at 
the last. There is, in point of fact, no room in 
all this earth for barriers of any kind. Should 
perfection separate itself from imperfection ? The 
Christ — and whenever we want to find an example 
for man, how we are compelled to go back to the 
divine man for it — the Christ had all the known 
high and great qualities. Did he build a barrier 
about himself ? On the contrary, there was never 
a man so approachable. As he came to all the 
world, so all the world could have come to him — 
yesterday, to-day, and forever — in a frank, open- 
hearted way. There are many things which Christ 
did not mention in his Sermon on the Mount which 
are nevertheless set down among the ** blesseds " 
of earth, and which are, every one of them, bar- 
riers. The aristocracies of wealth, fashion, soci- 
ety, and power are not agreed among themselves 
as to which is the best. They are cold and cruel 
among themselves and to all the outside world. 
Each aristocracy draws a circle about itself and 
hangs out a sign, ^' Noli me tangere!' 



1 88 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

Shall we not have pity for the things that one 
day shall be dust ? There are things that are eter- 
nal because they are glorious and grand, and be- 
cause they are true and beautiful, and because 
they are too precious to be lost. All of these 
things will have a place in heaven through all 
eternity. Let us hold to the things on which 
there is the stamp of immortality. Nothing else 
is worthy of human endeavor. 

I cannot conceive of a single barrier in heaven. 
I know that the poetry of the Bible speaks of 
walls and gates, but this is simply an old-time pic- 
ture of an Oriental city whose inhabitants are safe 
and happy forevermore. The gates of heaven, we 
shall find if we come nigh to them, are not shut ; 
nor does St. Peter stand there with great keys in 
his hand. There are no barriers to keep souls out 
of heaven. The reason that sin and darkness and 
unhappiness and sorrow and tears are not found 
there is because these things would be unhappy 
there if they entered ; and so they remain away. 

If sin does not find peace and happiness in holy 
places and paths, and so seek them out in this life, 
neither will it do so in other spheres. The man 
who stays out of heaven shuts himself out. God 
shuts no man out. No man has a right to expect 
that any soul that does not seek heaven on earth 
will seek heaven on the other shore. 




BRIDGING CHASMS 1 89 

XLIII 
BRIDGING CHASMS 

HEREIN lies the difference between animals 
with wings and those without : It is sim- 
ply a matter of bridges. What use has a 
bird for a bridge ? But for you and me, bridges are 
a necessity. The English lark on easy wing, soars 
on high and into heaven, while you and I would 
need Jacob's ladder ! Our own Southern buzzard, 
miles high, seems to touch, in his dreamy course, 
towering cloud bank after cloud bank, while you and 
I would need up there all the bridges of the land 
to compass them. I have stood on mountain-tops 
three miles high, and trembled as I looked over 
the brink into abysmal depths below ; while a little 
bird from near me, flying out into mid-air and re- 
gardless of the chasm underneath, there gamboled 
and played. How humanity has envied the bird for 
her wings ! How science has planned and schemed 
to imitate them ! But up to to-day when we have 
wanted ** a way across the impassable " — and this 
is what a bridge is — we have had to build a bridge. 
There is a fascination about all bridges. No 
man could walk across Brooklyn bridge, or ride 
across the high bridge over the Cincinnati South- 
ern Railroad in Kentucky, or the long bridge over 



IQO NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

the Danube in Central Europe, or scale the aerial 
bridges in the Alps, without feeling at such time 
an exaltation that well-nigh lifts him out of the 
human sphere, and shall I say, into the life of 
wings ? The greatest civil engineering feats of 
the world have been in bridging chasms. The 
engineer, in the interest of travel and commerce, 
in order to build his highways in mid-air, has had 
to call to his aid the strongest of woods and metal 
and stones, and also every cable and truss and 
girder and device known to science. 

In reality the bridge builder is one of the master 
workmen of the world. His bridges join together 
things separated. His bridges fill chasms. His 
bridges transform the impassable into safe and 
easy highways. A bridge needs by no means be 
made of steel, nor be as complicated as the sus- 
pension bridge over Niagara, in order to be useful. 
A pontoon bridge, simple as it is — planks laid 
across a series of parallel boats — and so quickly 
made, and lacking in all the elements of cost — 
yet a pontoon bridge may carry an army in a few 
hours across an impassable river, and so save a 
country ! 

Nature unwittingly sometimes makes interesting 
bridges. Natural Bridge in Virginia is one of the 
world^s wonders. And a tree, fallen across an 
impassable stream or bog, makes always a natural 



BRIDGING CHASMS I9I 

bridge that coons and foxes and opossums and 
rabbits and dogs and hunters praise without stint. 
Squirrels get safely away from hunters — as we 
have often found out — by using the long limbs of 
trees as a bridge and by springing from the tip end 
of one over to the tip end of another. By this 
means they travel as fast upon the trees as you 
can on the ground. 

A bridge, as we have seen, may be simply an 
arm outstretched like the squirrel's limb of the 
tree, or it may be a passageway held up by sup- 
porting pillars or by under- or over-head trusses, 
or it may be swung from lofty pillars at the ter- 
mini, or it may be a solid embankment of earth 
built by a railroad across a ravine, or it may be 
simply a half-rotten log thrown down as unfit long 
ago in the forest by the storm. Nothing is too 
lowly or too mean to serve as a bridge, and noth- 
ing is too costly and grand ! 

How fast the world is conquering all of her 
chasms ! Things that have stood separate and 
apart for centuries are daily being united and 
joined. The bridge is the symbol of science, civ- 
ihzation, and of union. 

It's worth going to the Rigi to see how moun- 
tain peaks can stand innumerable all about you 
and no one touch another. How tall and straight 



192 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

and individual they stand and with tops so keen and 
sharp ! 

But between them there lie as deep chasms as 
the world affords, and as impassable. Science and 
civilization have built no bridges just here. Now 
perchance if you stand on the slightest eminence 
and look down upon human groups, the individuals 
must appear in just some such way as this — per- 
pendicular, rigid, and with frigid heads high in the 
air, and wdth chasms quite deep and unbridged be- 
tween each one. The man who builds a bridge 
between such men is doing a moral and a scientific 
act. He is aiding in the unifying of humanity, as 
God and angels and redeemed stand unified in 
heaven. 

And the man w^ho causes his fellows to stand 
farther apart, and who thereby widens and ampli- 
fies the world's chasms, is certainly not a friend of 
humanity or a friend of God. Separation and iso- 
lation for individual or nation — what greater evil 
could happen to them ! Who shall build bridges 
between mighty nations, and so be crowned with 
undying laurel by angels in the highest place ? 

I have seen railroad engineers build bridges 
across ravines, and then fill up the space beneath 
and to the bridges level wdth stone and earth and 
debris. Heaven send us men who w^ill not only 
build bridges between nations, but will also fill up 



IS IT A CLOD ? 193 



the intervening void with bullets and shell and 
shrapnel and Krupp guns and Gatling guns and 
Mausers, Krag-Jorgensens and Winchesters and 
Martini-Henrys and Remingtons and assegai and 
machetes ! In all of earth there is no material 
half so fine for filling in chasms as are these. 

The impassable of yesterday will be the highway 
of to-morrow ! The world, before it ends, is going 
to bridge and fill in all of its chasms. And heaven 
and hell ? The bridge between them can be built 
whenever hell in man wants it. I do not say 
that the mere desire to escape consequent and 
righteous suffering will ever build this bridge. 
Bridges to heaven must be built from some other 
motive than that. 



XLIV 

IS IT A CLOD > 

BUT in the country if an indictment could 
be made out against " clods,'' and if the 
case should be committed to a jury, 
would not many a jury render decisions to the effect 
that clods are simply masses of earth, ugly, un- 
couth, inert, clumsy, useless, and valueless ? And 
would not in truth the same jury return similar 
verdicts in the case of many other concomitant 

N 




194 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

things of country life ? And viewed externally 
and superficially, perhaps they are. But on the 
other hand, if God has crammed his golden se- 
crets into clods and rock and bushes and other 
material things that he has made, and keeps them 
there till men shall find them out, does it not 
imply that he must have laid an obligation upon 
man that he should discover and reveal these hid- 
den things that must be beautiful and useful be- 
cause he made them ? 

The moment that a man's profession — his real 
life-work — becomes a humdrum thing whose sole 
object is the possession of bread, meat, and cloth- 
ing, at that same moment does every instrument in 
his hands for the accomplishment of his work, 
become dull and wearisome. It is not strange, 
then, that country life should so often be flat and 
unlovely. For it is too frequently the case that 
the men whose work leads them afield, have never 
delved for beauty and for God's secrets, but for 
bread only. 

*' As a man thinketh so is he " ; and whatever 
thought and conception a country dweller may 
have of his environment, that environment and all 
of its constituents, assume actual forms and shapes 
that are high or low, according as is the mind of 
the thinker. Swedenborg found out that the act 
of breathing-in or in-spiration which is the expan- 



IS IT A CLOD? 195 



sion of the human frame, was dependent upon 
thought and emotions, and that there was a fixed 
ratio between the two. And in the self-same way, 
nature about us expands and deepens in the ratio 
of our thoughts concerning it. 

Our thoughts of things depend largely upon our 
relative standing-points. A chemist looking upon 
a clod, sees a complex assortment of forceful gases 
and salts. A mineralogist looking at a clod sees 
in it many shining and bright faces of valuable 
minerals. A botanist looking at a clod sees the 
fair and sweet faces of lilies and roses and carna- 
tions peeping out of its elements. And to all of 
these the clod is a thing of beauty, and both the 
man and the clod are lifted upon higher planes 
and into finer life. But we cannot lift up the 
things about us without first endowing them with 
life. The more analytical and the finer our minds 
become the greater will be that host that will rise 
up from the dead and stand round about us in 
glorified raiment. 

See all you can in nature. Believe always more 
than you know. Unstop your ears of earthen clay 
so that you may hear all of nature's calls. Go 
into her fields, where on every mile there is spread 
out a million million miracles, in the same spirit 
which the Christ had as he stood over the grave 
of Lazarus and said *^ Come forth ! " 



196 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

A man can be poor and yet have high thoughts. 
A man can plough furrows and yet turn up only 
glorified clods, or going to and from his work, 
see bushes that are all afire with God. Struggle 
that you may not have the dullard's thoughts. 
Whether all the life that is under me, inanimate 
(so named) plant or animal, is immortal, I do not 
know, but there are those who believe that it is. 
Then the thought of yours or mine that ennobles 
them likewise ennobles us. And the thought of 
mine that fills them with life immortal, fills me also 
with self-same quality of life. We cannot endow 
the things about us with too much and too great 
life and glory and power. 

It is worth a man's life to put life into a thing 
that once seemed dead and lifeless ! 

But suppose that God's thoughts of men are 
that they are living men — aye, more, that they are 
immortal men : then, because he thinks us living 
and immortal and because his thought actually fills 
us with these qualities, God himself is thereby ex- 
alted, and we do in very truth ''glorify him." 

The moment that we empty life or self, and in 
our thoughts and emotions get clear conceptions 
of what God intended it to be — the moment that 
we endow this mortal life of ours with immortality 
and grandeur of destiny, and conceive it to be 



SOLVENTS 197 



filled with noblest works and aims, then we not 
only lend splendor to this life, but our souls are 
raised. And the man who thinks upon life as 
simply the instrument for mortal pleasure and 
short-lived material gain, not only sinks life to 
lowest level, but debases his own mind and spirit. 
That man of all his fellows who ascribes most 
glory and honor to God thereby lifts himself up to 
be a Saul in Israel. That man who most glorifies 
the origin, mission, and destiny of the human race, 
thereby places himself upon a corresponding 
higher level. And that man who has conceptions 
and thoughts of heaven — conceptions that make 
heaven mean more to him than a home of jasper 
walls and golden streets for those who shall enjoy 
therein eternally refined ease and rest — that man 
already is in heaven ; and there awaits him in the 
by and by simply a perfected form of what now is. 

XLV 

SOLVENTS 

|CIENCE being an exact thing, does not 
admit of ambiguity. If, therefore, you 
would speak exactly and scientifically, 
you should never use the verb '* to melt.'* Put a 
bit of lead into the fire or pig iron into a heated 




198 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

furnace, and they will, in ordinary language, **melt.'* 
A lump of sugar or salt dropped into a glass of 
cold or other water will also melt. These two sets 
of bodies it is true both go into a liquid state, but 
the causes of this fluidity are in no wise related or 
connected. Certainly therefore these differing 
and unrelated processes should not be designated 
by the same term. 

Heat, as we know, will convert inorganic sub- 
stances into a fluid state ; the earth in its entirety 
was at one time, through heat, in this fluid con- 
dition. In such cases heat is the sole and only 
cause, and the process is *' exactly'' described as 
that of ** fusion.'' Place sugar in water and the 
sugar, *^ exactly " speaking, *' dissolves." We there- 
fore speak of water as a " solvent " for sugar ; but 
as to why, in sugar's case, water is a solvent when 
it is not a solvent for a hundred other and seem- 
ingly similar things, the wisest chemist, in truth, 
knows no more than yourself. As a matter of 
fact, it seems astounding, even to the point of ab- 
surdity, that science should be so helplessly and 
totally ignorant concerning this which is the com- 
monest matter of every-day life ; and that this 
simple phenomenon should have causes that as yet 
lie far back in God's hidden mysteries. 

A solvent is a liquid which, when brought in 
contact with a solid, liquid, or gas, causes it to dis- 



SOLVENTS I 99 



appear, the result being a clear, homogeneous fluid. 
As regards solubility, each substance that dissolves 
is a law unto itself. Some are dissolved in certain 
liquids, while they are unaffected by others. In a 
given quantity of liquid, some are only partially 
dissolved (this point in the solvent being known as 
the saturation point), while others are wholly dis- 
solved. The heating of our solvent increases, in 
the case of some substances, their solubility, 
though the ratio of this increase may not be the 
same as the ratio of heat increase. In some cases 
the colder the solvent the greater the solubility. 
Common table salt, on the contrary, dissolves ap- 
proximately equally at all temperatures. Let me 
add just here that a compound substance to be 
dissolved must be in many cases placed consecu- 
tively in its several solvents. 

Of all solvents, water is the greatest. But 
water is not a universal solvent. A great host of 
metals, and rocks, the resins, many salts, and some 
of the active medical principles to be extracted 
from macerated plants, are not soluble in water. 
And while water approaches nearest to universal- 
ity as a solvent, yet water itself is not antiseptic 
and does not ** keep,'* and therefore we cannot 
preserve dissolved elements in water. Alcohol is 
the great antiseptic solvent. Most vegetable prin- 
ciples and fiber are extracted by it and after extrac- 



200 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

tion are preserved in and by it. These liquid prep- 
arations are known as wines, spirits, tinctures, and 
fluid extracts. Alcohol is also a solvent for resins, 
and is used in their preparations for commercial 
uses ; shellac varnish, for example, being simply 
gum shellac dissolved in alcohol. Ether, as a 
solvent, is mostly used to extract the oleo-resinous 
principles from organic drugs. 

A solvent can itself be dissolved, or it can be im- 
miscible, by another solvent. Glycerine, a solvent, 
is soluble in water and ether. Glycerine readily 
dissolves and holds in solution starch, albumen, 
pepsin, and vegetable acids. Chloroform (immis- 
cible) is one of the most useful of all solvents in 
drug assay. Benzine is the more specifically a sol- 
vent for all oil and fatty substances. Carbon di- 
sulphide has a strange and peculiar range of sol- 
vent work, being used m.ostly in the dissolving of 
India rubber, iodine, phosphorus, and sulphur. 
Besides the above, certain acid waters and alkaline 
waters are largely used for solvent purposes. Of 
all solvents there is no more notable work done 
than by those solvents in your stomach that in 
the process of digestion dissolve into a clear ho- 
mogeneous fluid the life-giving elements of your 
food, which are thus rendered ready for assimil- 
ation by your body, and which are for the mainte- 
nance of your life. 



SOLVENTS 20 I 



Each individual man, collectively and also as to 
his many-sided nature, like each individual element 
as regards solvents, is a law to himself. A thing 
may appeal to you that may not appeal to me, and 
a hundred things may not appeal to either. The 
things that appeal to us are those, to use the com- 
mon term, that we ** melt " into or that we are 
dissolved by ; they are things that our being im- 
mersed in causes us to lose more or less our iden- 
tity. Music, beauty, the mysteries of science, 
paintings, statuary, oratory, travel, the pursuit of 
wealth, are all of them solvents of some portion of 
many natures. But, however evident these things 
are in daily life, science cannot explain them. 

Science cannot explain why music dissolves me 
and not you, or why it should dissolve either of 
us. Men daily influence their fellows in propor- 
tion as they possess within themselves the neces- 
sary solvents and know when and how to use 
them. You could have all of this human world at 
your feet if you only held humanity's universal 
solvent and could only gain humanity's universal 
attention. Science has not as yet given us a uni- 
versal solvent in the physical world ; but this one 
thing lacking, God in very truth has given in his 
higher realms. In these realms, his universal sol- 
vent is love. And love is beautiful, not only be- 
cause it is a solvent, but also because this solvent 



202 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

is antiseptic. That which is dissolved in love will 
be kept and preserved forever and beyond ! 

That God has not as yet all of humanity at his 
feet is not because he does not hold in his hand 
that universal solvent which is the greatest thing 
in the world and the greatest thing in heaven ; but 
it is because he has not as yet gained the world's 
thought and attention. And this is why, since 
God holds this great solvent, the dominant notes 
in all the Scriptures are " Hear '' and ** Hearken/' 

XLVI 

CHEMICAL REAGENTS 

HE human eye is perhaps man's greatest 
source of discovery, the other senses 
following in their order. The microscope 
on one hand, and the telescope on the other, are 
only methods of multiplying the strength of ca- 
pacity of the eye hundreds or thousands of times. 
But if you were to fill a beaker with common at- 
mospheric air, or sewer gas, or if you were to dip 
up a goblet full of water from some mineral spring, 
or if you were to throw into a tin pail a spade full 
of any soil whatsoever, then even though the eyes 
and all the other senses of all the human beings 
on earth were turned thereon, the world would be 




CHEMICAL REAGENTS 203 

as ignorant of the contents — salts, acids, alkalies, 
and minerals, called chemical constituents — of 
these receptacles as it would be if the world were 
actually bereft of sight, hearing, feeling, taste, and 
smell. There is only one way of finding out se- 
crets such as these, and this is by means of that 
earthly divinity known among the sciences as 
chemistry. 

Chemistry makes her discoveries by means of 
what are known as reagents. An agent, as we all 
know, is one who acts. A reagent on the other 
hand, exerts a reflex action. A reagent is a 
substance used to effect a chemical change in 
another substance for identifying its component 
parts, or getting at percentage of composition. 
Of course, to find the component parts in a multi- 
farious compound, many reagents, and at different 
times, would be necessary. If your change pro- 
duced through a reagent leads you to recognize 
your ingredients, you have found, then, what is 
known as a '' test '' for this ingredient. If a 
farmer believes that his spring or well of water has 
iron in it, he simply has to add to a glass of it a bit 
of nutgall. If at the bottom of the glass is then 
precipitated (called a precipitation test) a dark pur- 
plish substance, then he has identified iron as be- 
ing in this water, because nutgall is a test for 
iron. If your doctor tells you to avoid starch and 



1 



204 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

to live on gluten bread, and if you wish to test 
your bread for starch, you have only to drop a few- 
drops of solution of iodine on a few crumbs ; and 
then if these crumbs turn blue (called color test) 
your bread is not pure gluten, but partly starch. 
Iodine as a reagent is known as an infallible test 
for starch, since nothing else in this manner colors 
starch blue. 

A chemical reagent will cause certain reaction 
when, as I believe, all other earthly causes would 
totally fail. If, for example, you wish to test for 
ammonia in water, then add a few drops of strong 
alkaline solution of potassium iodide and mercuric 
chloride to a few ounces of the suspected water; 
the latter will immediately show, through and 
through, a reddish yellow tinge, even though there 
be in our solution only one part of ammonia to 
twenty million parts of water ! 

All of the thousand tints of autumn leaves, we 
know, are chemical reactions caused by certain re- 
agents ; but we are in profound ignorance as to 
the what and the how of it. How delicately must 
all things hang in balances, since we see how easily 
greatest changes occur ! How multitudinous on 
the other hand must be all the reagents (''tests '*) 
as used by nature ! There is one for the yellow 
in poplar, and other reagents still for the varying 
maroon shades of sweet gum, oak, and dogwood. 



CHEMICAL REAGENTS 205 

And back, indeed, of each and every one of all the 
myriads of autumn tints you can see, as it were, 
a master chemist with a host of reagents testing 
this and that and yonder thing ! 

I do not doubt but that God has filled the moral 
world with as many reagents, and as potent, as 
he has given the physical. Armed as you and I 
are with them, and oftentimes and all unconsciously^ 
perhaps, letting them fall drop by drop here and 
yonder as we move among our fellow-men and 
brothers, how delicately and circumspectly should 
we always go ! 

I have seen one little reagent word change a 
man into a demon of fury, and I have seen one 
single word change a tumultuous multitude into 
one of calm and quiet. After seeing, under the 
proper reagent test, a goblet of clear water turned 
into that of reddish yellow tinge, even though there 
were present only one part of ammonia to twenty 
million parts of purest and clearest water — after 
seeing this, I am not surprised at the continued 
changes that I see in the men and women about me. 

Not infrequently, in chemical changes that are 
produced, the reagents combine with the thing 
tested for — the reaction in this case being some- 
what of a dual rather than a simple and single na- 
ture. Perhaps it is this dual and more glorious 



206 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

reaction that fills in October the forests with their 
many and marvelous autumn tints. And in some 
such way the substance or reagent or test out of 
heaven combining with the moral quality tested 
for in the human and earthly — in some such way 
I have often thought (since God must daily test 
the hearts of his children to find perchance the 
various goodnesses) that I had discovered the 
cause of the many beautiful reactions as seen in 
the lives and manners of men and women. And 
true it would be, if every human being only had in 
him those many moral qualities that God is consec- 
utively, perhaps, and daily testing for, then the re- 
action resulting therefrom would show beyond all 
peradventure, to eyes on earth and in heaven, far 
more of glory and brilliancy than even do all the 
combined October forests of earth ! 



4 



XLVII 

LOST MOTION 

HAVE often stood on the banks of a river 
— a stream made only for onward flowing, 
and toward which end all of its energies 
should be conserved and spent — and have noted 
mid-stream, and in the shallows by the banks, 
whirlpools and eddies that for the most part re- 




LOST MOTION 20/ 



mained stationary and that simply turned rapidly 
about in circles upon their axes. Their place 
might be marked by a roar of waters and by foam 
which is the wrath of waters, but even if there 
were no noise, there would always be seen whirl- 
ing bits of wreckage and of varied debris that had 
been caught and so held fast. These rotary ed- 
dies are, in a sense, the wasted energies of the 
river ; and in truth there is not a Charybdis, small 
or great, in all waters of seas or rivers, that does 
not to man and craft mean danger and perhaps de- 
struction. 

In some such way there is not a moving thing 
on earth, or an engine of force or motive power, 
in which there is not more or less deviation, or 
slack, or eccentric, that produces lost motion and 
that wastes energy and vitality. I can at this 
moment think of no skill that needs to be reduced 
to such refinement of nicety as is that which is 
required in making and fitting the engine rods of 
a locomotive or stationary engine. 

It is said that a slack of one-sixteenth of an inch 
will destroy an engine in twenty-four hours ; while 
a slack of one one-hundred-thousandth of an inch, 
is plainly discernible. 

It is the worn gearing, and loose nuts and bolts, 
the portions that are out of plumb and line and 
center, the parts unscientifically made and fitted, 



208 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

and the unlubricated places, that make machinery, 
the world over, wobble and reel like a human be- 
ing who is drunk. You never felt in your life 
a jar or ''jolt'' or jostle, but that it surely indi- 
cated lost force and wasted energy. And every 
jolt means wear and tear of machinery, as well as 
nervous tissue on the part of the human sufferer. 
It is pain in the human world that quickly tells us 
of some injury to ourselves ; and so likewise in 
the physical world, it is rattle or roar, and the 
thousand other noises — machinery's cry of pain — 
that quickly tell of loss and injury to engine or 
other vehicle in motion. Have you ever noticed 
a long, loosely coupled freight train move off or 
come to a stop, and then in comparison watched a 
solidly built vestibule train ? Did you ever work 
the handle of a w^ater pump and feel in your very 
finger nerves the loss and waste ? Have you ever 
ridden in a wagon to which the horse carelessly or 
ignorantly had been loosely harnessed ? 

Misdirected energy is another potent form of 
energy that is wasted and force that is lost. Igno- 
rance, as well as knowledge, is always trying to 
accomplish some object or to go somewhere. Read 
the list of follies that ignorance has placed in 
the patent office in Washington ! What a vast 
amount of energy has been consumed and wasted 
upon perpetual motion alone ! 



LOST MOTION 209 



There is such a thing as the wrong thing ini- 
tially and throughout, and there is too, a right thing 
wrongly carried out. Ignorance may be counted 
upon as being the friend of both. Wherever ig- 
norance goes, she absolutely blocks the way be- 
hind her with wreckage. Count and foot up your 
annual billions of losses that ignorance causes — 
buildings wrongly constructed, badly insulated 
electric wiring, ignorant firing and watering of en- 
gines, the improper tillage of land, the imperfect 
conservation of water, the unscientific building of 
dams, rough and improper road making, food im- 
properly cooked, the ignorant administering of 
drugs by the physician, or the butchering of the 
human being by the surgeon ! And the worst of 
it all is that energy wasted is motion lost forever. 
For who can recover and so gain again the energy 
spent and wasted on yesterday ! 

The world would have been redeemed long ago 
and the millennium of a new earth would have come 
if only the energies of past generations had been 
rightly impelled and directed. And there would 
in this day and generation be as speedy a redemp- 
tion of the world, if only the religion of Christ 
were given free course on earth and if it were not 
impeded and hindered by energy wasted and mo- 
tion lost. 

o 



2IO x\ATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

The church of Christ could to-day do anything 
under high heaven that pleased it, if only its forces 
were rightly placed, conserved, and carried for- 
ward. In all the universe there is nothing more 
able and powerful than righteousness ; and when 
rightly directed, there is nothing that could with- 
stand it ! 

But the church cannot be better than its indi- 
vidual members. And all of these members, in 
truth, have their counterparts down in the physi- 
cal world in the various parts of earth's enginery 
and vehicle or method of motion. The law of 
one kingdom must always be the law of another 
kingdom. We do not wonder at all the material 
cries of pain of machinery, and damage to and loss 
of machinery, when we see worn gearing, and 
loose nuts, and universal slack in every part. We 
do not wonder at jars and jolts and jostle, when 
we see rude tracks and roadways. Nor would our 
minds fill with slightest wonder if a city's river 
that spent all of its energies upon loitering eddies 
should never reach the sea ! 

How can a church go forward that is full of 
rust-eaten members ; members ever pulling on the 
back strap ; members that are ever pirouetting 
about themselves ; members that show, in all that 
they do, grievous exhibition of general slack. Re- 
member that one one-hundred-thousandth of an 



RESISTANCE 2 I I 



inch of slack in an engine rod would in no great 
while wear out the engine ! 

No waste, no loss in highest heaven ; then in 
heaven, what an exhibition must there be of con- 
served energy ? The human mind fails in imagi- 
nation and thought of what may be accomplished 
and done in that wondrous land by redeemed, an- 
gels, and God ! 

XLVIII 

RESISTANCE 

|HE most beautiful of all zigzag courses, 
looking like fiery steps leading from 
earth to heaven, is the path of the light- 
ning through the skies. As thin and easy of pene- 
tration as is air, yet even air can swerve and turn 
aside and make as crooked as a mountain path 
Jove's titanic fiery thunderbolts ! 

That we do not take largely into account the 
resistance of air is shown by the shapes — square 
and with high front — of all our carrying vehicles, 
such as cars and wagons. The patterns of all of 
these, so far as speed is concerned, and so far as 
concerns kindliness to all animals that draw them, 
are a slur upon human intelligence and a shame 
upon our humanities. And certain it is that the 




212 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

shapes of these must soon change, now that the 
demand for greater speed is so great and pressing. 
I do not doubt but that the railroad express train 
of the future will be cigar-shaped and sheathed in 
from cow-catcher to rear platform ; and that all of 
our lesser vehicles will be built with an eye to the 
lessening of air resistance. 

If our ship-builders were to build ships after the 
pattern of a wagon, our trans-Atlantic companies 
would need fifty in place of five days for the pas- 
sage to Liverpool. The pattern of a ship affords 
to date the ideal for quick transit. The ball and 
shell of the modern rifle fired in the air, the as- 
cending balloon, the fish in the water, and the fly- 
ing bird, as well as all sharp-edged tools for cut- 
ting — these all conform as far as possible to the 
type of a boat or hull of a ship. On account of 
the denser medium, the sharp-nosed ship, however, 
cannot go more than one-third as fast as the more 
blunt railroad train. 

There is not a thing that moves in earth, sky, 
or water, be it animal, light, heat, electricity, 
water, or wind, that does not meet with resistance. 
Resistance is the most universal force found in all 
matter in nature. It is a component part indeed 
of all matter. Nor can you by any means dissem- 
inate matter into a state of such distention and 
thinness that all resistance will be lost. Resist- 



RESISTANCE 21 3 



ance therefore must ever remain a desideratum 
and drawback which material matter can never rid 
itself of. 

Now it is possible practically to rid a given area 
of matter. We call that state a vacuum — a place 
without hindrance. The most beautiful experi- 
ments in physics are made with electricity and 
light. In commerce, since the boiling point of 
water in a vacuum is much less than in open air, a 
vacuum affords us a means for largely reducing 
certain costs. The great industry of salt making, 
for example, would be a far more costly affair if it 
were not for the fact that the water in brine can be 
evaporated (and thus leave salt) in large vacuum 
pans at a low temperature in place of a high tem- 
perature. Cargoes of moist grain can be put into 
a vacuum pan and give off their moisture at a low 
and cheaply produced temperature. Drying in 
vacuum is said to take one-tenth less of the steam 
and of the time and of the space than does hot-air 
drying. Indeed, the uses of vacuum pans are just 
becoming well known and they promise in the 
future the greatest results. 

If it were possible to create for electricity's 
travel a condition similar to the vacuum, what an 
easy solution would that be of power transmission ? 
If Niagara's power, costing a trifle, without loss 
could be converted into electricity and carried to 



214 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

Chicago or San Francisco, then the world would 
have no more use for coal, for heat, power, or arti- 
ficial light. But for electricity, copper and silver 
wire offer the least resistance known at present, and 
this resistance increases so greatly and so rapidly, 
according to distance, that for distant power along 
this line no great work is being done. 

In the higher realms of mind and spirit, we have 
the same resisting media, and the same general 
lack of conformity to all of those patterns or laws 
that make for ease of progress in any given line. 
A whole nation, for example, can stand out for 
centuries against civilization, Christianity, or the 
higher learning. 

The most pitiful thing in human life, I believe, 
is an ignorant man. Enlightenment stands in the 
same relationship to him as does the ray of sun- 
shine that falls upon a brick wall, both being im- 
penetrable media. And the saddest thing in this 
world is the immoral man. The light of heaven 
falls upon many such for three score and ten years, 
and never once gains entrance. 

God and Christ and angel have not shut them- 
selves up in a fancied city's wall, and without com- 
munication, and so left earth and man to work out 
their own salvation. God is as actively at work 
in earth to-day as ever he was — and angels too ! 



NATURES VARIED STANDPOINTS 21 5 

Heaven works through men. Men are God's inter- 
mediaries or rather media. The degree of resist- 
ance depends ever upon the individual man. You 
can see the shimmering light of heaven shining 
through some people's faces, and in all of their 
deeds you see the Christ-man himself. A touch 
of their hand — and you feel an electric thrill from 
some dynamo higher than the stars ! 

To spiritualize your life means to rid it of the 
material, and the more you rid it of the material, 
the less resistance to the divine there must remain 
in you. If you could only find some spiritual air 
pump that would rid you of the earthy, if God 
could only work in and through you in earthly 
vacuum, how quickly the kingdom of heaven would 
come ! 



XLIX 

nature's varied standpoints 




ACH square foot on this earth's surface, 
represents a different and a new physi- 
cal standpoint for man's use. Far more 
numerous, but not so tangible, are those other 
standpoints absolutely unthinkable in number, to 
be found within the earth and within the still 
greater sea and within the still greater enveloping 



2l6 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

atmosphere. Each of these myriad standpoints 
represents a new outlook, or a new point of view 
with a different environment. 

Now even as regards contiguous and related 
standpoints, go if you please from any one of them 
one step forward, or indeed in any other possible 
direction, and it would mean for you that some ob- 
jects hitherto lost would come into view, and still 
others would grow more distinct and clear. 

To gain new outlooks attained by the seeking 
out of new standpoints, is the sole object of travel. 
The provincial man must ever have his limita- 
tions and must remain narrow, contracted, preju- 
diced, biased, and uncosmopolitan. No man can 
ever be said to know this earth until he has seen 
it from its every viewpoint. The explorer, there- 
fore, is deserving among his fellows of the high- 
est places ; kings and scientific societies and na- 
tional commercial unions take dehght in the honor- 
ing of him. 

Viewpoints vary largely in value, according to 
their relative elevation or altitude, and according 
to clearness of surrounding media, and according 
to the relative richness of contiguous environment. 
There is perhaps on a clear day, in all of earth, no 
nobler and more beautiful view than is to be had 
from the Rigi in Switzerland. Compare now, if 
you will, in point of value, Rigi's outlook with that 



NATURES VARIED STANDPOINTS 21/ 

to be had at the bottom of canon or pit, or that 
in the depths of the sea, or in mines of earth, or 
in mid-Sahara. 

To everything that hath eyes to see, God has 
given the powers of locomotion, and for these he 
has spread out a wondrous and beautiful and diver- 
sified world — a world, as I have said, with myriad 
outlooks and views. I would have pity even for a 
bird that, with wounded wing, could never go far- 
ther than her nest ; infinitely do I pity the man 
who, through poverty or indifference, has never 
made some exploration of God's great world. And 
glad I am, because we have these capacities for 
locomotion, that you and I and all animal life are 
not bound unwillingly down to a given habitat. 

In all the kingdoms, each standpoint affords us 
a new view and a new outlook, and gives us by 
this a much more comprehensive knowledge of the 
total object under observation. There is not a 
subject in earth or heaven, that men or angels can 
ever thoroughly know until they have stood upon 
every square foot of it and scanned its environing 
landscape to its own horizon line. To gain daily 
new outlooks by planting feet on new standpoiuts 
is the habit of the wise. Culture comes only in 
this way. The man who persists in standing ever 
in his own tracks, or goes back and plants himself 



21 8 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

immovable in the tracks of his fathers, needs man- 
kind's immeasurable pity. 

I care not whether our every subject be of sci- 
ence or art, or whether it be a matter of profound- 
est morals, yet we may know, since God made it, 
that in its length and breadth and height and 
depth, there are myriads of viewpoints of obser\^a- 
tion and study and knowledge concerning it. The 
man who has thought and studied and toiled and 
prayed only for a day, has just entered upon the 
threshold of knowledge, and is apt, like the man 
who has never traveled a hundred miles from home, 
to be narrow, contracted, prejudiced, biased, and 
provincial. And however strange it may seem, 
yet it is surely true, that any man, be he in pulpit 
or pew, or wherever else you may please, if he pos- 
sess but few points of view, will be by that much 
the more dogmatic. In matters of religion, a sect 
is a mere thing of dogmatism ; while a church — 
exploring all the continents of earth to save a man 
— is the most comprehensive and all-loving force 
on earth. 

Possibly the man who has least patience and 
sympathy with mankind, is he who knows the 
least about men. Herein lies the cause of God's 
great sympathy, love and helpfulness toward human 
kind. He sees us from viewpoints that you and 
I can only dream of. He sees us from the view- 



NATURES VARIED STANDPOINTS 2ig 

points of infinite capacity for knowledge and hap- 
piness, and infinite possibilities of the highest and 
holiest kinds ; and because from these viewpoints 
he sees these possibilities in us, he suffers long 
with us and he lends us too, continually, so far as 
we will allow him, his own powerful inspiration 
and aid. And certain it is, wherever men look 
upon man as God looks upon him, such men will 
always be the world's sympathizers, the world's 
helpers, and the world's saviours ! 

I know of no point of view that looks out upon 
so fair a view as is afforded by the viewpoint of a 
Christian optimist. Cynicism, agnosticism, and 
disbelief should have no place in God's world. I 
have faith in a continual upward trend. There 
shall be a new earth, there shall be a new heaven, 
and there shall be a new man ! I cannot say how 
long it will take to lift humanity in its entirety out 
of the pit, a pit without outlook upon beauteous 
vision, but I must believe that this consummation 
at some point in the beyond must surely come. 

If it were possible for you and me and all men 
to view sin and selfishness and unbelief and materi- 
alism, as God, from his standpoint or point of 
view, sees them, then man*s redemption would pro- 
ceed at infinite speed ! If from your viewpoint, 
materialism, and unbelief, and all forms of sin, do 
not appear to be the most horrid things in earth, 




220 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

then fly as for your life to some plane with clearer 
and higher outlook ! 



L 

HARMONY 

j|T is by combining sounds of different pitch 
that the composer writes music — it may 
be a waltz, a lullaby, a march, or an 
oratorio. A modern musician can in one single 
composition combine every sentiment that the hu- 
man being is capable of, from the grave to the gay, 
or from the despairing to the triumphant. 

Modern music is thus largely descriptive. Com- 
position that consecutively describes such conflict- 
ing emotional conditions, must necessarily be com- 
plex. Aside from this, our first thought is that 
these rapid dissonant changes would be naught 
but discords ; but our musician by rapid modula- 
tions can change, without jar upon your ear, a 
minor into a major, or a major into a minor, and 
in a twinkling convert a wail of despair into a 
paean of hope ! The musician in truth can com- 
bine and can correlate and bring into mutual re- 
lations, things most dissimilar, unrelated, and seem- 
ingly opposed. The musician in a sense can make 
a corral out of the universe and correlate not only 



'i 



HARMONY 221 



I 



the things of earth, but bind planet to star and 
star to constellation. 

Through the use of common chords, the musi- 
cian, by bringing into mutual relationship things 
unrelated, separate, and apart, unifies in a man- 
ner all the things of his kingdom and is a prince 
among the synthesists. To do this requires often- 
times what is known as close harmony ; but to 
the refined musical ear, the closer the harmony the 
more exquisite the delight. 

A child with his forefinger can pick out note by 
note, in a limited way, a simple melodious exer- 
cise. The musician by the practical combination 
of chords, with both hands and by the use of many 
octaves in his instrument, can elaborate his har- 
mony and make tones and progressions unthought 
of by the child. The history of harmony is the 
history of ever-increasing richness of combinations 
of common chords. All rules of harmony are con- 
stantly being modified. Many chord formations 
and voice progressions wholly unpermissible at one 
time, are to-day in current use by the masters. 
The elaboration of harmony has required centuries 
of labor and thought. 

There are possible infinite arrangement and re- 
arrangement of harmonious material, and infinite 
combinations of related parts — each one aesthetic- 
ally pleasing. There thus can be no end to har- 



222 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

monious composition. The perfection of harmony 
possibly is found in the large orchestra, scores of 
the instruments of which have differing notes, dif- 
fering chords, and differing quality of sound. All 
of this variety wonderfully enriches the melody. 

While the music of the past has been largely 
arbitrary, the structure of harmony in the future 
seems to have possibly no limitations. There will 
ever be, in harmony, a lessening of distance or 
ratio as between notes, a finer gradation, a contin- 
uous larger use of tones foreign to the original key, 
and progressively a still more glorious joining and 
combination and correlation of notes. 

All modulations require a return to the original 
keynote before the end of the musical composition ; 
but in the meanwhile the player may have brought 
into harmonious use every note of his instrument. 
No less restricted than our musician is the inven- 
tor of harmonies in the moral world, who joins, 
combines, correlates, and brings into mutual re- 
lationship, those who are separate, apart, and seem- 
ingly unrelated. The keynote of your neighbor 
may be different from and foreign to your own. 
But there are happily such things as modulation, 
gradation, and progression. To compass the end 
may require close harmony, yet it is harmony per- 
haps all the more beautiful. 



HARMONY 223 



In the harmonious material that lies between 
yourself and the world, and between God and the 
world, there is possible infinite arrangement and 
re-arrangement. In the moral world, also, there 
can thus be no end to harmonious composition. 
God's thought for the world is that it may be a 
mighty orchestra, antiphonal to the orchestra of 
heaven. 

The coming of Christ means the unification of 
the world, I in you, you in me, and God in and for 
us all ! In this re-arrangement no man can live 
to himself or by himself. No matter how far away 
and lost he may be, you can reach him — by modula- 
tions, remembering, however, that the rules thereto 
are not arbitrary. 

The need of us all is to get a finer sense of 
quality. The quality of the bassoon, violin, cor- 
net, and trombone — they all widely differ ; but in 
place of making orchestral discords, they vastly 
enrich the melody. 

Pythagoras said that the seven planets were the 
seven notes of the octave, and all the heavenly 
bodies were a part of an universal orchestra ; not 
one, thought he. 

But that in its motion like an angel sings. 

In the highest sense I doubt not the truth of 
this, nor do I doubt also the universal brotherhood 



224 NATURE IN THE WITNESS-BOX 

to be — ^jiist so soon as we correlate ourselves, the 
one with the other and with the angels and with 
God ! This we can do through Jesus Christ alone. 
He is the keynote of the universe. In him alone 
can all things be one, — one in harmony and one in 
eternal purpose. 




JAN 5 1903 



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